Online Backup for Sites Manually

Website Backup Using Control Panel

In this article, I go over how to manually back up and restore your website and database.  The steps are actually quite simple and fast.  You can also backup your site using automated backups with free website backup software as your backup assistant, but it is good to know how to backup your site with a manual method, in case you ever need to and it is also a good idea to use this method once in a while to supplement your automated backups.  Losing all the information you worked so hard to gather for your site is not fun, so learning how to protect your information is worth your time.

1.  In Hostgator, go to you Control Panel and under Databases, select “phpMyAdmin”.

2.  On the left hand panel, select the website database you want to back up.  (If you are not sure which one to select, click on a database, and look in some of the files to identify which site the database is for).

3.  Click the “Export” tab and select “Custom”.

4.  Under  “Tables”, click on the “Select All” link to select all the tables.

5.  Under “Output”, make sure “Save Output to File” is selected and “None” for compression is selected, unless your site is very large.

6.  Under “Format”, have “SQL” selected.

7.  Under “Object Creation Options”, select “Add drop table” and select “If not Exists”.

8.  Hit the “Go” button at the bottom of the page and use the “Save As” option to save the file on your computer.

Restore from Backup Your Website Data

Restoring your website manually is just as easy as backing it up manually, you will restore files in no time.  Below are the quick and easy steps.  If you encounter a website restore error, you might want to talk to your hosting provider or web developer to get assistance.

1.  In Hostgator, go to you Control Panel and under Databases, select “phpMyAdmin”.

2.  Click the “databases” tab and pick the website database that you want to restore your website into.  (If you are not sure which one to select, click on a database, and look in some of the files to identify which site the database is for).  You might see a list of tables for your site inside the database.

3.  Next click the “Import” tab.

4.  On the next screen, use the browse button to retrieve the file backup file from your computer to restore data.

5.  Under “Format”, select SQL.  Lastly, click the “Go” button.  This last step may take some time, but eventually you should see a confirmation that the job has been completed successfully.

We hope this has been a useful guide to backup and restore your site data files.  Now you won’t wonder “how do I restore my files”.  You can see that it is actually a lot easier than many people think.  You do not need special technical assistance to do it.