Creating a full website backup

While the majority of hosting packages come with some form of backups included, there are many benefits to creating and storing personal backups of your web applications, including:

• The ability to choose the point in time that the backup is taken - for instance a short time before a large update to the applications source code is being made, providing a recent point-in-time snapshot of the site should breakages occur during development.
• Verification of the backup’s integrity - manual backups can be inspected/restored locally to ensure that recovery is possible should a catastrophic failure occur.
• Speed of recovery - sometimes only a single or small subset of files need to be restored and uploading these from a local backup can be done in a matter of minutes. Host provided restoration of backups may require extracting a subset of files from a full snapshot of the account/server which can add time to the operation.

Creating a usable backup is a matter of compressing the applications source code and its database to an archive, which can then be downloaded and stored locally. This can be achieved by:

Logging into your server via SSH

While you can create backups using FTP, logging in via SSH allows you to create a single downloadable archive directly on the server

Identifying the directory that your application is stored in

On M.D.G. IT hosted VPS services this will typically be /var/www/html/<website domain>

Using the tar command to create an archive

It is not always necessary to back up the entire codebase for backup purposes. For example if the application stores caches or logs, this would result in larger backups to download/restore and offer no real benefit. Excluding subdirectories from the archive can be done by adding an --exclude flag and the path to the directories to be excluded to the command, e.g.:

Create and compress a database backup

You will now have two files created in your home directory - app_backup.tar.gz and database_backup.sql.gz which can be downloaded locally via SFTP using a client like FileZilla.