Welcome to the first post in the Upwork series where we talk about making a backup of your website, one you can store anywhere and use anywhere to restore your website at a later stage.

Post I – Site Backup

Hi there.
I need someone to copy a current website so that I can store it as a manual back up. I created this site on a sub-domain and then transferred to the real domain. I just want to make a copy of the sub-domain in case anything goes wrong with the real domain before I delete it off the sub-domain and use it to build another site.

Making a backup of site is in general a very straight forward task with most hosters. Backing up your site’s files and database will be no issue. It is just a matter of either a control panel feature like there is in CPanel or Plesk for instance – or using an (S)FTP program like Filezilla to download the files and the control panel or command line to backup the database. Cpanel and Plesk are hosting programs that can be used in the browser to run all kinds of hosting related tasks. And so backups is one of them.

After the backups are done they can be checked. This to make sure the database file is okay and that all files are there. A quick local test of the site is easily done. Developers tend to do that on their own local server just to make sure all is well. We use Laravel Valet or XAMP / WAMP for this. Once that is done files and database can be zipped and stored on any PC.

PS With that backup you will always be able to restore the old website on any server with any hosting provider.

PPS This post is part of our Upwork Series – a series of post responding to job vacancies on Upwork. We try to answer to issues potential clients have and offer solutions asked for. We only use public vacancies and do not mention a client name directly.