Although we provide our Rochen Vault service with all of our hosting services for daily backups, we encourage you to supplement these backups with your own personal backups as well.
It’s a best practice to take backups often, especially after any major changes to your site. We do ask that you only keep one full site/account backup on your hosting plan itself at any time, however you can keep past backups on your computer or via a third party storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive too.
Fortunately many modern scripts such as Joomla and WordPress have excellent third party addons which can be used to create and restore backups. Although there are plenty of choices available, we recommend going with an option that will allow you to save your backups to an external storage platform and that can also limit the number of backups stored at a given time. In many cases the free storage tiers provided by services like Dropbox are more than sufficient to hold your personal backups.
Generating a full cPanel account backup
Full cPanel backups include all of your files, databases, email accounts/messages, DNS zones, and all other cPanel related settings.
A full account backup can be taken on demand at any time by logging into cPanel and navigating to the “Backup” page.
Once there, click the button which reads “Download a Full Website Backup”.
Leave “Backup Destination” as “Home Directory” and click “Generate Backup”.
You will then be shown a page indicating your backup is in progress. Allow some time for this to complete, then click “Go Back”.
If your backup has completed a link will be shown to download a copy of it directly. If it is still in progress, you can refresh the page after several minutes to check again.
Configuring backups in WordPress
We have seen great results with the “UpdraftPlus” plugin for WordPress, so the instructions below pertain to this specific plugin.
From your WordPress Admin you’ll navigate to Plugins -> Add New -> Search “UpdraftPlus” -> Click “Install Now”, then “Activate”.
You’ll be brought back to your active plugins page now. Next to “UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore” click “Settings”.
Navigate to UpdraftPlus’ “Settings” tab from here. Then change “Files backup schedule:” and “Database backup schedule:” to “Daily”.
Choose your desired remote storage platform. For the purposes of this tutorial, a free Dropbox account was used.
When you click “Save” to apply your changes you will receive a prompt to click a link to authenticate your site against your remote storage service.
After that’s been clicked and you’ve followed the prompts, you’re all set!
You can switch to the “Current Status” tab, then click “Backup Now” to ensure a successful backup is taken.
Configuring backups in Joomla
From your Joomla /administrator panel, select Extensions from the top menu, then Manage -> Install -> Install From Web -> Search “Akeeba”.
Select “Akeeba Backup” -> Click Install -> Click Install again.
You should receive a message indicating “Installation of the package was successful.”
Navigate to the Components top menu, then select “Akeeba Backup”.
You should receive a prompt asking if you would like to allow Akeeba Backup to configure itself.
This step is highly recommended for optimal results. Click “Configuration Wizard”.
This will take some time as Akeeba will run some benchmarks to optimize your configuration.
Once this is done click “Backup Now” and confirm the backup completes successfully.
Please note that the free version of the Akeeba Backup plugin only allows for on-demand backups. For scheduled automatic backups as well as uploads to a third party storage service like Dropbox, you would need to upgrade to the Akeeba Backup “Pro” license.