How to Backup a Magento Store Using cPanel

You should backup a Magento store regularly. You definitely do so before installing any extensions or making any changes to the files. Most of the time, however, Magento installs are too large to back up using the built-in cPanel backup utilities. It’s pretty easy to do so manually using cPanel, however and here’s how.

Backup Your Magento Database:

1. Login to your site’s cPanel
2. Go into phpMyAdmin
3. Find and open your site’s Magento database
4. Now is a good time to clear the “logs” if you want to make the DB a little smaller. There are about 5 tables with the word”_log_” in the name which can grow quite large, so it’s ok to empty those now.
5. Go to “Export”, select custom, and under “Compression” I usually choose “gzipped” because it is a smaller file. Also, make sure “SQL” is set as the file type.
6. Click “Go” and your database will begin downloading. This may take a few minutes.

Backup your Magento Store Files:

1. in cPanel, Navigate to your “File Manager”
2. In the “PUBLIC_HTML” folder, click “Select All”
3. Now click “Compress” and select “GZiped Tar Archive” in the pop-up.
4. Choose a name for your backup (I’d recommend something including the date) & Click “Compress File (s), to begin the archive. This should only take a minute or so.
5. Now select the file you just made and click download to save it to your local machine.

Now you have a copy of both the DB & site files in 2 separate, tidy little files. You can also do this more quickly using SSH. We’ll have an article on that soon.