How to backup your website
A backup of your website and storing those backups is an essential process for website owners. Whether it’s a small personal site or a worldwide corporate site, backups are often overlooked, but they’re super important.
This guide shows LCN Web hosting and WordPress hosting customers how to create a website and database backup.
Before you start, you’ll need to know your FTP login details. You can check and update these from your LCN account.
If you would like to check and update your FTP details or create new ones we have a guide for this here.
Let’s get started…
Backup your website content
To backup of your website, an FTP client will be needed. We would recommend using WinSCP or FileZilla as your FTP client, but feel free to use any FTP software you’re comfortable with.
Alternatively, if you have Backups activated you can use our Backup tool.
The following steps will guide you using WinSCP.
- Download, install and then run the WinSCP FTP program.
Please note: When installing any piece of software, read the installation instructions carefully. Some software comes bundled with freeware you don’t need.
- In the Login box, enter upload.lcn.com in the Host name field.
- Change the Port number to 21.
Please note: This will change the File protocol to FTP
- In the User name field enter your FTP username.
- In the Password field enter your FTP password.
- Click Login.
- There are two panels in the centre of WinSCP, the left-hand panel represents the files on your computer, the right-hand panel represents the files on your web hosting.
- To backup your files, select all of the content in the right-hand panel and drag it over to the left-hand panel.
Please note: for ease of use, it is recommended to create a new folder on the your local machine for your website to be stored in. This folder can then be copied to CD, USB, DVD or an external hard drive for safe keeping.
Backing up your database
If you built your website with an application such as Joomla or WordPress, then your website is linked to a database. Databases need to be backed up separately as they are not stored in the same location as the website files.
- First, the database username, password and hostname are needed. If you are unsure of these, connect via FTP or use File Manager and locate your websites configuration file.
- For WordPress, these can be found in the wp-config.php file
- In Joomla, these can be found in the configuration.php file
- and OpenCart, these can be found in the config.php file
Make a note of these details, they will be needed later.
- Navigate to www.domain.com/mysqladmin. Replacing “domain.com” with your domain name.
- Login using the database Username, Password and hostname gained earlier.
- Select Databases and choose your database e.g. domain_com_db
- Click Export and click Go.
- You’ll be ask to download the file and save it to a location on your machine.
Please note: How often backups are taken is up to you. However, we would recommend to take regular backups of your website, especially before and after any major updates. Although we offer a backup utility, it is still advised to keep a local backup as well.