cPanel includes an easy feature to backup your website, however, if your site is very large you’ll want to use an FTP client to download your website files instead.
Steps to create a backup using FTP
Step 1: Download and Install Filezilla
Step 2: Use Filezilla to connect to your account
Step 1 Download and Install Filezilla
The first thing you’ll need to do is download Filezilla.
Step 2 Use Filezilla to connect to your account
After you’ve downloaded and installed Filezilla, use the quick connect feature to connect to your FTP account. To do so, you’ll need the following settings:
Host: For the host value, enter example.com. For example, if your domain name is domain-abc-123.com, enter domain-abc-123.com
Username: Enter your cPanel username here.
Password: Enter your cPanel password here.
Port: The default port number is 21, but you can leave the port blank here.
Step 3 Download your files
After you have connected, then you can download your files. There are several different ways to do this, we recommend the following:
In the following directions, you will be working within different quadrants in FileZilla. The following screenshot defines them:
In the upper-left window, click your desktop to open it.
In the lower-left window, right click and choose “Create New Directory“.
Label the directory so that you will recognize it later. In this example, we named the folder “Website Backup” followed by the date.
Double click the new directory in the lower-left window to navigate to it.
In the lower-right window, click any folder and then hit Ctrl-a on your keyboard to highlight all of the files and folders
Selecting all of the files and folders in the above step will download all files in your hosting account, including files used by cPanel. If you don’t want to backup every single file, you can hold Ctrl on your keyboard and only click the folders that you want.
public_html: If you want to download your website files, select the public_html directory
Email: If you want to download your email, select the mail directory.
Databases: Your databases are not stored in the same directory as your hosting account. If you would like to download a backup of your databases separately.
Right-click on any of the highlighted files/folders and click “Download“. This will download all of your files/folders to the “Website Backup” folder that we created above. Please note that the time it will take to download all of your files will depend on the number of files that you have and how large they are.
