FTP Backup of Cpanel Account

Morning all. I have a problem that I can’t Google-solve, but suspect is simple to do so! I have my website that I want to back-up. The web server is managed with cpanel, which has a full back-up to FTP option… only where on earth can I back this up to?! I can’t find what I need to do to have a remote, or local (to my house) FTP server to do this with. Thanks! Rich

By default your backups are in your home dir, just click on them and download them to your local harddrive like any other file.

Home directory too small to accommodate full back up. And my internet here isn’t good enough to down load such a big file.

Does the FTP option let you choose a destination? If so, then FTP to an external drive.

Have you contacted whoever it is that administers the hosting service you are using for your website? Several of them have backup options to their own or other destinations like B2, AWS, etc.

Your hosting/cPanel provider probably offers a reasonable backup solution. it may be worth a few dollars to avoid the hassle of setting up your own and paying for storage elsewhere.

File this under “this isn’t the way to be healthy”, but if you absolutely need a place to FTP to, you could get a third-party FTP provider. Or poke a hole in the firewall on your LAN and run an FTP server on your Mac.

I agree that your cPanel provider should have a way to do this, even if it’s just some way to glue some extra storage onto your account.

How big is this file we’re talking about?

30gb I think!!! I would rather the back up not be with the host as then I couldn’t restore if they blew up.

Just noting that I actually sell cPanel-based hosting. So I run into this issue from both sides. :slight_smile:

There are multiple considerations here.

If you have a 30 GB backup, and you store it locally, that’s cool - but eventually you have to take into account the process of moving the thing across the Internet to restore. For many people, uploading a single 30 GB file is going to be very time-consuming - especially at a time when you’re in full-on panic mode because your website just crashed.

Also, if I recall correctly, even FTP-ing your backup to a third party still requires that the backup be generated and stored in your account to begin with. First cPanel makes the backup, then they FTP it. So you may wind up with a challenge there if there isn’t enough room to store it temporarily.

If you really want to have a copy of a cPanel-generated backup archive on your computer - which isn’t a Bad Thing since it’s just a compressed archive, which you might want to be able to unarchive yourself for your own purposes - then you should talk to your host about getting your disk allocation increased. After that, you can just download and delete the huge file.

Otherwise, you can do a backup relatively easily without relying on cPanel’s built-in functionality.

There are two steps - getting your database data (if any), and getting your files.

First you go into phpMyAdmin (or the equivalent tool, if you’re not using MySQL) and do a raw SQL dump of all your databases. Do a full-blown MySQL export (and TEST the restore to make sure you’re doing the export correctly!).

Second, you use an FTP app like Forklift to manually download a copy of all your files. It’ll take a long time to download all those files, but you should be able to just let it run overnight.

With cPanel, those two steps will give you all of your raw data, minus the cPanel metadata.

Hope that’s at least a little helpful. :slight_smile:

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That’s awesome - thank you very much.