CMS Security Handbook: The Comprehensive Guide for WordPress®, Joomla!®, Drupal™, and Plone®

Server-Side Backup and Restoration Methods

The cPanel utility includes a great facility for backing up your web server. Incorporating this method into your plans is easy to do, and provides a full backup of your website. The downside to this tool is that it does a full backup, and the file can quickly grow in size. If that's what you need, however, then there should be no problem. The size of the files could be large and take a little time to deal with during a download.

Another manual backup method is to use the command line (via Putty) to pull a copy of the database and the files separately. This has the advantage of speed and size, but the disadvantage of managing multiple file sets.

First take a closer look at the cPanel method.

Using cPanel

In many hosting situations the commercially available application cPanel is in use. This is one of the best website management tools around. It's highly stable and easy to learn.

The steps outlined here assume that cPanel is installed on your web host. The purpose of this discussion is to show you how to back up and restore using the cPanel system.

To use cPanel, follow these steps:

1. In cPanel, find the phpMyAdmin button and click it to open the phpMyAdmin administrator interface.
2. Locate the database you want to export. In the example shown in Figure 6-1, the chosen database is called watcher_cookbook. Click the Export button at the top of the screen to start the process.

   Figure 6-1: Selecting the database

3. On the left side of the screen, ...