Video 1 : Backup your website with a plugin

In this video, we'll see how to use a plugin to backup and restore a wordpress site.

The plugin we will use to backup our website is Updraftplus Backup. This plugin is very popular and has over 800,000 active installs and more than 2000 five star reviews. It was last updated 5 days ago so it's pretty current and it's compatible with our version of wordpress.

Let's install and activate the plugin.

We'll now configure the settings. The plugin creates a menu item in the 'settings' menu. And there's also a link to the settings screen of the plugin here.

By clicking on backup now, a backup will be created on the webserver. But that's not the best thing to do. You would want the backup to be on a remote location. You could create a dropbox account and have the backup copies stored there instead of storing them on your webserver.

By clicking on the settings tab, you will be able to configure the settings ...

The very first thing you need to do is choose whether you want to manually backup files, or if it's to be done automatically. Let's choose automatic weekly for teh files and the database.

Let's leave the number of backup copies this plugin will retain at 2.

Here, you need to choose the service you want to use to store the backups. There are a lot of supported services and since I have already set up a drop box account to be used with this website, let's choose dropbox.

You need to authenticate with dropbox, but we need to complete the rest of the settings and click save changes before we will be able to authenticate with dropbox.

You want to backup plugins, theme files and uploads.

If you want to receive an email every time a backup has been completed, you would want to select this.

Click on save changes and you will be asked to authenticate your dropbox account.

Let me authenticate the dropbox account I have set up for this website.

Click on 'allow' ...

The dropbox account has been authenticated.

It's now creating the backup ... let me pause the video.

It's now completed the backup and if you go to the existing backups tab, you can see it has one backup copy here.

If you want to restore, click on restore.

You can also delete the backup copy.

This plugin is really easy to use.

In the next couple of videos, we will see how to take backups manually and restore them.

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Video 2: Manually backup wordpress from Cpanel

select all - compress - zip archive - name -

dbname - config file

CPanel - phpMyAdmin

In this video, we will see how to backup a wordpress site from your hosting account's cPanel. We will see how to backup all the files and folders and the database.

This site is hosted on hostgator, and this is what you will see once you log in. If you are hosting your site with a different host, then the interface you see might be slightly different. But in general, all of the options will be very similar.

To backup the files, we need to get to the 'file manager'. Scroll down and here it is.

Click on the file manager. If you have several websites hosted on one account, you will need to choose the document root for the site you wish to backup.

We are now in the root directory of this website. We need to select all of these files, zip them and download the zip file.

Let's select all of the files now ... and click on 'compress' in the top menu bar. Choose 'zip archive', give the zip file a name that will make it easy to know what it's about. And click on 'compress files'.

Let me pause the video while the files are compressed.

The files have been compressed.

If we click on reload, we will be able to see the compressed file. It's here. If you click on 'download' with this file selected, the zip file will be downloaded to your computer.

Once the zip file has been downloaded, we will need to download the database.

For that, we need to know the name of the database. By opening the wp-config.php file, we will be able to see the name of the database.

The database name is next to the 'DB_Name' option here - . We'll copy the database name into notepad.

This is the name of the database.

We'll now close this window, and go back to the cPanel.

Scroll down until you see a link to phpMyAdmin. This from where you will be able to backup your database.

If you have several websites hosted on your hosting account, you will see a list of databases on the left. You will need to select the database associated with the site you are backing up. In this case, we need to select this database - .

We'll click on the database name here and you will see this screen that lists all of the tables in the database.

Choose the 'export' button in the top menu bar.

Don't change anything on this screen. You want the file format to be SQL. Click on 'go' and the database will be downloaded.

All of the files, folders and the database have now been downloaded.

In the next video, we will see how to restore the website from the backup files we have now downloaded.

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Video 3: Manually restoring your wordpress site

We'll now see how to manually restore the wordpress site from the backup files we downloaded in the previous video.

I will now delete all of the files, folders and the database - and then restore the site using the backup files we downloaded.

Sometimes, this is the only way to restore a site. Like when a site gets hacked. Or if you update a file and accidentally break your site. Before you do any changes to your site's files, you would always want to take a backup of all of the files and the database so that you will always be able to restore your site no matter what.

We will now delete all of the files and the database. To do that, we will go to the cPanel and the file manager. You will need to go to the document root of the website.

Before we delete all of these files, let's take a look at the website. Everything is looking good.

We will select all of the files, and click on delete. It asks whether you really want to delete all of the files. Click delete files and all of the files will be deleted.

The directory is empty now.

If we now go back to the website ... and refresh the page ... the website has been deleted.

We will now delete the database.

Let's go to the cPanel and click on phpMyAdmin.

We'll now select the database ... this is the database we have to delete.

We now need to drop all of these tables. Scroll down to the bottom, select 'check all' and from the drop down menu, choose 'drop'.

It asks whether you really want to execute this query that will drop all of the tables. Click on 'yes' and all of the tables will be dropped.

Now, all of the tables of this database have been dropped, and all of the files have been deleted. The website is now truly gone.

Let's now restore the site from the backup files we have downloaded.

Let's now go back to the cPanel, click on file manager and go to the document root of the website.

We'll now upload the zip file we downloaded.

I will pause the video while the file gets uploaded.

The upload is complete. If we close this window and click refresh.

Let's delete this zip file.

We now need to restore the database.

Let's go back to phpMyAdmin, select the database ...

We'll again go to this same database we deleted ...

All of the tables of this database have been dropped.

Now, click on this 'Import' tab here.

Click on 'choose file' and select the saved copy of the database ... click 'open'.

You don't have to change anything else here. Click on 'go'.

The database has been uploaded.

If we now click on the 'structure' tab here, you see all of the tables that were dropped have now been restored.

Let's go back to this tab and click refresh ...

The site is now back - and everything is just as it was before we deleted the site.

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