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Backing up your website

When you are using Frontpage to maintain and publish your websites, you usually work on a local copy and then publish that to the web. You can back up your local copy. However, if you are working directly online, your backup options are a little more limited. Also, many websites will have dynamic data such as form data, bulletin board postings, online catalogs, inventory and databases that also need to be backed up.

Most hosting companies today provide tools that will allow you to back up all or part of your website.  your website. Most small business websites should be backed up on a regular basis. How regular depends on the specifics of your situation. An interactive site needs to be backed up much more often than a static site.

Your specific strategies depend on your host, your control panel and how much authority your web host is willing to allow. If you are running cpanel, you will need to be able to access he control panel. Normally this is done by going to www.yourdomain.com/cpanel and entering your id and password. Once you are in you should see a number of options. Hopefully one of the options is to backup your site.

You should do backups when your traffic as light as it can slow down access for users. Also, in many cases, the backup is placed on your server. You can, in many cases, right click on the backup and download it. Be aware that these files can be quite large and may take a while to download. Also, watch your bandwidth costs (you are downloading your entire website). If you are using SQL files, you may need to back the SQL files up separately.

If the backups are made to your web space you will need to download them, usually via ftp. You also need to be aware that backup files on your website will be taking up additional space.

This is not a substitute for backing up your website source files since the backups may or may not be useable on another host.

Last modified:  11/10/06