#8 - Back up your Joomla website

Ok we all know you have taken all steps to prevent your website to secure your website and prevent it from being hacked. However, there are many other things which can go wrong with your Joomla website. When you have a busy site, you can never have enough backups. The following are easy ways to have a complete set of backups of your Joomla website. Did I mention that each of these comes for free?

Backup your SQL data

Backing up the content of your Joomla website is critical. You will probably be able to recreate your template if you lose it, however recreating your content is a much harder thing to do especially if you rely on several 3rd parties / visitors for your the content.

The jombackup mambot from Jomres is a small mambot which when published creates a MySql backup, compresses the file and sends it to you. The default settings are enough, no playing around with parameters is required. Just enter your email address, publish and you'll soon start getting a daily backup right to your mailbox. Try not to obliterate your mailbox too, and don't use the same email server as the host of your site, so that if you lose your site, you don't lose your email too 

Backup your template / media / customisations etc.

These are things which do not change often ... so a simple FTP transfer to a backup area should be sufficient. You can also choose to use a component for your backups.

A good component for backup is the XCloner backup component. This allows you to backup and restore your website easily. It also allows you to move your website from host to host.

Another non-commercial one which comes to mind is the JoomlaPack component. This creates a zipped file of all the content in your website which you can just download. This also makes it easier for you to take a backup whenever you need.