Backup website files in cPanel

In this article I'll walk you through how to download a home directory backup of your account in cPanel. This is considered a partial backup of your account, and it includes all of the website and email files from your user's home directory, but does not include any MySQL databases.

This is a great method to use periodically to backup your website when you're making large changes, such as updating to the latest version of the software you use to run your website. With this partial home directory backup you'll be able to restore your own website files to a previous date at any time using cPanel.

When you restore a partial home directory backup like we're creating covering below, this is going to overwrite any existing files currently on your account. So if you have a /public_html/index.htm file on your account, and the backup you created also has that file, the file from the backup will be restored over the current live file.

If you have a new file such as /public_html/index2.htm live on your website that didn't exist in the backup, or you've gotten new emails since you made your partial home directory backup, these files will not be overwritten during the restore.

Download home directory backup in cPanel

Using the steps below you'll learn how to download a partial backup of your website including all the files in your home directory.

1. Login to your cPanel.
2. Under the files section, click on Backups.
3. Under Download a Home Directory Backup, click on the Home Directory button.
4. You can now navigate to the folder your web-browser downloaded the backup to, in this case we can see our backup is named backup-example.com-1-30-2013.tar.gz.

You should now have successfully backed up your website files by downloading a partial home directory backup in cPanel. The next step would be learning about how to restore website files in cPanel.

Using this home directory backup you can now restore your website files at anytime in case your files accidentally get deleted or have any issues. You probably would also want to learn how to backup your database in cPanel, and restore your database in cPanel to fully understand how cPanel handles restoring the different parts of your website.