The backup is the website’s life insurance. After a botched update, a compromised plugin or an accidentally deleted folder, the question is whether you have a recent, usable backup – and whether you can actually access it.

We run automatic daily JetBackup backups of our cPanel hosting accounts, from which you can restore files, databases and email accounts yourself. However, there are situations when you may need your own downloaded backup: for example, before moving your hosting, before a major reorganisation, or if you’d like to store your backups on your own computer. In this article, we’ll show you step by step how to create one.

1. Log in and open the ‘Backup’ menu item

Log in to cPanel and, in the ‘Files’ section, click on the ‘Backup’ icon. If you can’t find it, type ‘Backup’ into the search bar in the top right-hand corner.

2. Select the type of backup

On the Backup page, you can create two types of backup:

• Full Account Backup (Download a Full Account Backup): this saves your entire hosting account into a single compressed file, including files, databases, email accounts and settings. This is useful if you want to archive your entire account or move it to another server.
• Partial backups: you can download the home directory (all files), individual MySQL databases, and email forwarders and filters separately. These are smaller, take less time to complete, and can be restored individually.

In most cases, the aim is to perform a full backup, so the following steps cover this.

3. Specify the destination for the backup

By clicking on the ‘Download a Full Account Backup’ button, you can choose where to save the completed backup:

• Home Directory: the default setting. The backup is saved to your hosting account’s home directory, from where you can download it to your computer.
• Remote FTP server: once the backup is complete, it is automatically transferred to another FTP server. You will need to specify the server name, username, password, port and remote directory.
• Remote FTP server (passive mode): the same process using passive mode, which may be required if the remote server is behind a firewall.
• Secure Copy (SCP): the backup is transferred to the remote server via an SSH-based, encrypted connection. If possible, choose this option instead of FTP.

You can also provide an email address to which cPanel will send a notification once the backup is complete. This is useful for larger hosting plans, as the backup may take a longer time to complete.

4. Start the backup

Click on the ‘Generate Backup’ button. cPanel will indicate that the backup is in progress; you can safely close the page while this is happening.

5. Download the completed backup

If you have selected the home directory, the completed file will appear on the Backup page under ‘Backups Available for Download’, with the date included in its name. Click on it and download it to your computer.

Two important things to do after downloading:

• Delete the backup from your hosting account. A backup left in the home directory takes up space on your hosting account, and subsequent backups will become increasingly larger as they may contain the previous one. You can use the File Manager to delete it.
• Store it in a secure place. The full backup contains database passwords and emails, so do not store it in a public place, and if possible, do not keep just one copy.

Detailed description with images

You can also find the steps for a full backup with screenshots in our knowledge base article on full cPanel account backups. If you’d like to restore something from a backup, our article on restoration will help.

Manual backup or JetBackup?

The two are not mutually exclusive. We create and store the daily JetBackup backups at a geographically separate location, so these are the quickest way to recover from everyday errors (deleted files, corrupted databases). The backup that you have downloaded yourself is useful if you want to preserve a particular state in the long term, or if you are moving your hosting. For an important online shop or company website, it is worth using both.

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