In the cPanel under the Files section are two icons: Backups and Backup Wizard.
The backup areas in the cPanel allow you to download the courtesy backup file of your entire web site, a home directory /public_html or a particular MySQL, alias, or filter backup file. If your computer crashes or your personal backups are destroyed, these files allow you to recover your site in a convenient manner (you could use FTP to download each file, but it would take much longer as the files are not compressed). Having multiple backups in different locations provides security against permanently losing information.
***Important***: You should keep your own backup copy of your web site as well. See Backup Policy for more details.
Note: A complete web site backup file includes everything: web pages, images, scripts, MySQL Databases, and access logs. A large site will have a large backup file, and will take some time to download.
To download in the Backups icon:
- Click on the Backup button in your account's cPanel.
- Click on the dated button to begin downloading to your computer the entire system backup or click on the link underneath the required area to download an SQL, Alias, or Filter backup file.
- Save the file to your disk.
To download in the Backup Wizard icon:
- Click the Backup link.
- Click link to do Full or Partial backup.
- With either choice, select the link for the available backups to begin downloading to your computer.
- Save the file to your disk.
In the Full Backup option, you can generate a new backup you can download when completed. This is limited to 5 GB. An email will be sent to notify you when completed. For an account larger than 5 GB, use the command line.
Note for Windows users: This file is in .tar.gz format (a GZIP archive file that contains a TAR archive file). This is a common archive format used on Unix machines, in the same way that .zip is a common Windows archive format. Most compression utilities should be able to uncompress a .tar.gz file.
