How to restore your website from a backup

Free daily backups run on every hosting plan with multiple restore points, and you can restore them yourself from cPanel. There is no ticket, no queue and no fee, which matters because the value of a backup is mostly a function of how quickly you can use it.

Restoring is destructive: it overwrites current data with older data. Read the first section before you start, because the most common backup mistake is not failing to have one, it is restoring the wrong thing over something that was fine.

Before you start

• Work out what actually broke. Restoring only the database, or only a folder, is usually right — a full account restore also reverts everything that was working.
• Take a backup of the current broken state first. If the restore turns out to be the wrong call, you can still get back to where you started.
• Note the time the problem began, so you can pick a restore point from before it rather than after.

Steps

1. In cPanel, open Backup or JetBackup, depending on which your plan provides.
2. Choose what to restore: full account, home directory, a single database, or individual files.
3. Select a restore point from before the problem started.
4. Confirm and start the restore. Time taken depends on size — a small site is a minute or two, a large one considerably longer.
5. Wait for completion before making any other change. Interrupting a restore leaves the site in a worse state than either version.

Check that it worked

• Load the site and check the specific thing that was broken, then check something unrelated to be sure the restore did not take out more than intended.
• Log in to the admin area of your application, since a database restore can revert user accounts and passwords along with everything else.
• Check that recent legitimate content still exists. If the restore point predates it, you may need to recover that separately.

If it goes wrong

Recent content disappeared after the restore

Expected — you restored to a point before it existed. This is why taking a backup of the broken state first matters: the current data is still available in it, and support can help extract the missing rows.

The site is broken in a new way after restoring

Usually a mismatch: files restored to one date, database left at another. Restore both to the same point rather than mixing them.

No backup exists from before the problem

Retention is finite, so a problem that went unnoticed for weeks may predate every available restore point. Contact support — occasionally an older copy exists — and treat it as the reason to keep an independent off-platform backup as well.

Keep a copy somewhere other than the platform that hosts the original. A backup that lives only on the same infrastructure as the live site is one serious incident away from being no backup, and that is true of every host including this one.

VPS plans from €34 a month include snapshots, which are a different tool from backups: they capture the whole machine and roll back in seconds, which makes them the right thing to take before a risky deployment.