CPanel is an administration control panel that is used to manage the domains hosted on the server. The CPanel allows you to backup and restore the files on your site easily.
The following is an instruction which guide beginners on how to back up and restore their site in Cpanel.
First of all, you should login to your CPanel account. To login to your Cpanel account, you simply enter your username and password and click on the submit button.
After you have login, you should scroll down the page. Under the Files section, you will notice the Backup icon. You should click on the Backup icon.
You can customize the backup option so that it will automatically backup within a set period of time. You can customize it to perform backup daily, weekly or monthly. The backups can be downloaded to any folder on your computer.
If you have never setup automatic backup, you can click on the Generate or download a full backup button to download the files of the entire site.
You should click on the backup destination button to choose the folder which you wish to perform backup. The passive mode transfers a secure copy of the files. If you want to save the backup on a FTP server, you must enter the email address, FTP address, username and password. The Port and Remote directory fields are optional so you can ignore them.
After you have entered the details, you should click on the generate backup button. The full backup which you download from here is not used in the restore process. However, they can be uploaded directly to the new server so that the website can be restored.
The partial manual backup service allows you to perform backup on different areas of the site. The backup process will create backup for the home directory, database, filters and subdomains. You will notice a restore button beside these buttons. To restore a file, you should choose the suitable button and select the directory where you want the backup file. For example, if you want to restore a file, you should click on the restore button. After that, you should click on the archive file. Subsequently, you should click on the OK button to complete the process.
The backup files are not in zipped format. They are in tar.gz format. The tar.gz format is a zip format that is supported by Linux. Windows hosting does not support the tar.gz format. If you want to upload it to a server through FTP, you can use 7zip to extract the folder on your desktop. The tar.gz zipped folder can be restored to the database without being extracted.