How to back up your Joomla! CMS

To reduce the risk of losing your valuable website content in the event that:

• your website is compromised by hackers,
• your website breaks following a Joomla! CMS or 3rd party extension update,
• your hosting provider is targeted by hackers (Example: GoDaddy, as reported by The Hacker News on 18 February 2023).

Your website Backup will enable you to quickly move your website to a new server or hosting provider should the need arise.

Always before updating the Joomla! CMS or its third party extensions.

Periodically just in case: daily, weekly monthly.

How often will depend upon how frequently to change website content.

Full Backup = files and database.

Partial Backup = files or database.

We recommend always creating a Full Backup of your website.

The focus of this article.

For safe keeping if nothing else.

Hosting provider terms & conditions often specify that you are not permitted to store files on the server other than for use with your website.

Files not used by your website could be removed without warning.

To avoid being in breach of your hosting provider's terms & conditions.

Hosting providers often specify that you are not permitted to store files on the server other than for use with a website.

We recommend that you do not store website backups anywhere inside the:

• public_html folder (if cPanel), or
• httpdocs folder (if Plesk).

Reason: website Backup files include sensitive data such as the password for your website database.

And there is a risk that a hacker will gain access to a Backup stored in these folders even when protected by a Web Application Firewall.

Instead store your Backups outside the public_html or httpdocs folder.

Create a folder called mybackups (or similar) one level above these folders.

This level will usually be called home.

Via Web Browser

In order to create a Backup you will connect to:

• your website, or
• your Hosting Control Panel

via your web browser, hopefully using a secure connection: HTTPS.

And whilst connected you will be able to download Backups from the server, but this is NOT recommended.

Reason: there is a small risk of Backup files being corrupted when downloaded via a web browser.

And the risk of file corruption increases with the size of website Backup.

Via FTP Client

Instead learn how to download Backups using an FTP Client like FileZilla, using an SFTP (or FTPS) connection.

Why not use an FTP connection?

File transfers via FTP are unencrypted, meaning that your username and password will be transmitted in the clear.

If a hacker obtains these details then they can do anything you can do with your Hosting Account (and website)!

Read more: Transfer Files using an FTP Client.

Store each Backup File in a carefully labelled folder.

Keep a log of significant changes which occurred between the previous Backup File and this one.

Example: Joomla! CMS update and details of any 3rd party extension updates.

Store your Backups on at least one external drive.

Two if you really value your Backups.

For example:

• one on the cloud and one on an external hard drive;
• on two separate external hard drives, one stored in a remote location.

It is possible that your Backup may be corrupted during the process of being backed up or downloaded from the server.

For this reason we recommend you:

• unpack and review the content of your Backup after download (can you see files and database?), and
• compare the size of this Backup with the most recent one (is it significantly different?).

You should also learn how to restore a website Backup using:

• a desktop server (example: XAMPP) or
• a separate Hosting Account online

so you can periodically check that Backups have not been corrupted.

Read more: Test your Backups.