Friend has asked me to create a tutorial so she can do a backup of her site without me involved or without her having to pay for something like CodeGuard that only seems to work part of the time. So what I’m going to do here is demonstrate how to do a quick and dirty backup of a ZenCart website.
I need to stress that while you will be creating a backup of your website and important files/information, you will not be able to just toss them back up on the site if there is a problem and you need to use your backup to restore the site. You will still need some assistance, particularly with the database.
For starters you’re going to need to have the login information for both the cPanel/FTP of the site. Usually these are the same. For starters, let’s take a look in the cPanel and see if we can do this the easy way… start by logging into the cPanel of your site, this will usually be something like http://yoursite.com/cpanel
Looking at the size of the DISK USAGE we can see that any backup we create is going to be huge even with compression. So what we’re going to do is the down and dirty method by first going into the BACKUP panel of the site so we can snag the database(s). From the main cPanel screen click on BACKUP, if you use the image above as reference it’s just to the left of the green arrow and a bit above, it looks like a clock in the middle of the blue circle thingy ( that is a technical term btw ).
Now I had to blur out my information as I am doing this on a live site that I really would avoid handing the information out for. But if you look at the blurred out area you can see there are blue bits in there, those are the names of the databases you have for the site. Depending on who or how your website was created the database you will need might end in _zc1 or something like that. If you aren’t sure, just click on each one and download them, save them to a folder on your computer.
Go ahead and close out your cPanel and we’re going to fire up whatever FTP client you use, you do have an FTP client don’t you ??? Okay, let’s go with FlashFXP, it’s by far my favourite FTP client and I am glad I paid for it many years ago. You can get it here: https://www.flashfxp.com/download and they even have tutorials you can watch here: https://www.flashfxp.com/tutorials/videos. So go snag that really quick if you don’t have an FTP client already.
Go ahead and open up your program or FlashFXP, I’m going to be using FlashFXP from here on out but you should be able to figure things out for just about any FTP client. So once we’re in the open program we need to click on SITES, then SITE MANAGER.
This will open up a window where we can input our information needed to connect to the website. Once we’re into that new window you need to click on NEW SITE located in the bottom left corner of that window. It’s going to ask for a name so let’s just go with “Bob’s Site” for the name, then click on OK. You will now be looking at the smaller window like above, this is where we start entering in our information about the site. First we need to enter in the address of the site, this will typically be something like http://www.bobssite.com/. Login type remains set to normal, Username and Password. These are the same as your cPanel login so go ahead and input them there in the proper spots and click on APPLY at the bottom of that window. Once you’ve hit apply you can now click on CONNECT to access your site. If all goes well as it should, you’ll see this screen:
Now in the right hand panel scroll down to the public_html folder, this is where we will find the files we’re going to backup. Once in there you’ll see something like this:
Now in the left panel, navigate to whatever folder you created for the database backups to go in, now we’re going to download all of the files we need for the site itself. To download the files you can either highlight them all or do them individually, I strongly suggest you just grab them all and download them UNLESS…. unless you have a lot of downloads and/or large images. In theory you do not need to download either of these folders because you should already have them on your computer. So what you can do, is in the right hand panel, just click on any folder, press the CTRL+A buttons to highlight all of the folders, then while holding down the CTRL key, click on the images and the downloads folder to deselect them… now my site has a lot of other things in there but let’s just pretend it doesn’t. Now with all of the folders and files for the site selected you need to drag it over to the left panel and drop it. That will start the download process. Depending on how big things are file wise, it should take about 10-30 minutes depending on your internet connection.
When it is finished you should see that the same folders in the right panel, are now also visible in the left panel. And guess what… that’s it. It’s a down and dirty means to backup the core files for your site when the overall site is to large for a backup in cPanel.
The reason your site may be to large for a cPanel backup is due to the files in your download and/or images folders. Downloads, especially anything like image/graphic sets can quickly shoot your disk usage through the roof, which is also one reason we don’t download them during this tutorial. As mentioned before you should already have these files somewhere on your computer, and downloading them will just take up a lot of time.
Now here comes some fun stuff….
With this backup, you can quickly and easily recover files you might have damaged trying to do something on your own that you’ve never done before and probably should have asked for help with. But you didn’t so now we have to restore some or all of the files to the site. Essentially do everything listed above but in reverse. This time you will take the files from the left panel and drag them to the right panel. When it asks to overwrite the files, click OVERWRITE ALL and it should put your site back to where it was before you monkeyed it up.
NORMALLY, and I use that term loosely, you will not need your database backups unless your site has been hacked or compromised in which case, you get help, give them the backup of the database and provide your cPanel login so they can go in and restore it. DO NOT CLICK ON THE RESTORE DATABASE button and upload that file because 9 times out of 10 it won’t work. This is where you need someone who knows what they’re doing.