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For those who have his own blog or website hosted on CPanel Hosting, you might want to learn how to backup your website in CPanel. By default CPanel provide few easy way to backup your website. But today i?m going to cover how to perform full backup to backup your website in CPanel hosting.
To perform full backup in CPanel Hosting, just follow the steps below:-


  1. Login into your CPanel with the username and password
  2. Click on Backup
  3. Click on Generate / Download a Full Backup
  4. Select Home Directory in Backup Destination and enter your email address. others just leave blank and click Generate Backup
  5. Done! You just perform a full backup in CPanel. You will received a notification email once the backup is done.
  6. Once the backup is ready, you can FTP into your Account to download the backup file. CPanel locate your backup file in your root directory (/home/username/) and CPanel backup filename normally look like this:-
    backup-mm.dd.yyyy_hh-mm-ss_username.tar.gz

You also can FTP your full backup file to your another FTP server (if you have more than 1 server). Just enter the Remote Server (FTP / SCP) which is the IP or domain name, Remote User (FTP / SCP) and Remote Password (FTP / SCP) in the Generate Backup page before you hit Generate backup button, your Backup File will be transfer to the remote server.
How to Backup your Website Automatically with cPanel

July 26th, 2009 ? 16 Comments


In my last post, I released my Simple FTP Backup Script (v0.9b). This Perl script allows you to perform a backup of your files and MySQL databases as well and upload it to a remote FTP server (read this post for some FTP backup services).
Since the release of this backup script, I?ve made some small adjustments to some minor preference parameters you can now set. Click here to download the Simple FTP Backup Script v0.9c
How to a Schedule a Backup Task using cPanel

This tutorial has been written assuming you?ve already got a remote ftp storage. I will be using my BlueHost control panel (cPanel) so yours may look slightly different.


  1. Rename the backup script file name to ?ftp-backup-script.pl? and upload it to your website account through FTP. Make sure you?re uploading it in a non-public folder if possible. If not, make sure to protect this directory so that nobody else invokes the script from a web browser. Personnally, I suggest you create a directory at the same level as /public_html
  2. Use your web browser to access cPanel (http://www.yourwebsite.com/cpanel).
  3. Click the Cron Jobs icon :
  4. On the next page, click the Standard button.
  5. Enter the command to run : /usr/bin/perl /path/to/backup/script/ftp-backup-script.pl
  6. Scheduling the task like shown below would run the backup script once a day at 3 AM :
  7. Hit the Save Crontab button and you?re done!

If it doesn?t work, try the following :

  • On the Crontab page, enter an email address where the cron output will be sent to. This might give you valuable information as to why the backup task didn?t run properly.
  • Try setting the permissions on ftp-backup-script.pl to 0755
  • Make sure the path to Perl is /usr/bin/perl. In case you don?t know, contact your web host?s support.