Automated nightly backups
Your hosting account is automatically backed up each night. Historical archives are also maintained every night for 7 days, plus once every week for 4 weeks, plus once every month for 3 months. You can access these backups through cPanel > JetBackup.
Downloading & generating backups
You can download these backups, and also generate point-in-time backups yourself.
The below instructions cover various cases depending on whether you want to download a backup of a single website, or the entire cPanel account.
Accessing cPanel
Before you can download backups, you need to access cPanel, which can be done in two ways:
- If you know your cPanel username and password, you can access it directly via https://www.example.com/cpanel where 'example.com' is your website's domain name
- Or, you can also access it through the services section of our Client Area — click the hosting service for your domain name, then click Log in to cPanel on the left. (If you don't know how to access our Client Area, click here for help.)
Downloading a cPanel backup of your entire hosting account
Precedence maintains nightly historical backups of your hosting account, which you can access through the JetBackup section of cPanel.
To download the most recent full backup, go to JetBackup > Full Backups, ensure that the top result shows today's date (if not, you can sort by Creation Date), then click Generate Download, then Add to Download Queue.
Depending on the size of the hosting account, this could take several minutes to generate. When ready, a download button will appear, which will allow you to save a .tar.gz file to your computer. This file contains all data associated with your cPanel account, including any files, databases, emails, and DNS settings. It can be restored to a new hosting account on any hosting provider that uses cPanel, or it can be extracted to obtain specific parts of the backup if needed.
If you would instead prefer to generate a point-in-time backup, rather than using the previous night's automated backup, you can do this via cPanel > Backups > Generate Full Backup. To conserve disk space, we recommend deleting the backup after you have downloaded it, which you can do via File Manager.
Downloading a backup of a WordPress website
The easiest way to download a backup of a WordPress website is to use the WP Toolkit feature of cPanel.
Step 1: Access WP Toolkit
Once you're in the cPanel dashboard, click WP Toolkit.
Step 2: Find Your Website
You'll see a list of all WordPress websites associated with your cPanel account. If there's more than one, locate the one that matches the domain name of your website.
Step 3: Open the Backup and Restore tool
Under the Dashboard tab, click the "Back Up / Restore" link. This will slide out the Backup and Restore section.
Step 4: Start a Backup
Click the "Backup" button. You'll see a progress bar indicating the progress of the backup. Depending on the size of your site, this process may take a few minutes to complete.
Step 5: Download Your Backup
Click the link to download the backup as a .tar.gz. This backup contains the website files and database. A WordPress web developer will be able to extract both of these from the backup file, and use them to restore the website on a web hosting account.
Downloading a backup of a non-WordPress website
If your website is not using WordPress, and you want to download a backup of only the website and not any other data within your cPanel account (such as emails), you can separately download the files and the database using the JetBackup section of cPanel.
First, go to JetBackup > File Backups, ensure that the top result shows today's date (if not, you can sort by Creation Date), then click File Manager. You'll need to know where the website files are located, but most of the time, they will all be in the public_html directory. Check the box beside public_html (or whichever directory contains the website), then click Download Selected, then Add to Download Queue. Depending on the size of your website, this process may take a few minutes to complete. When ready, a download button will appear, which will allow you to save a .tar.gz file to your computer.
Next, you'll also need the database. Go to JetBackup > Database Backups and ensure that the top result shows today's date (if not, you can sort by Creation Date). If there are multiple databases in your cPanel account (i.e. more than one backup exists for a given date), you'll need to know which database is used by the website you want to backup (or download all of them if you're unsure). For the database you want to backup, click the Generate Download button, then Add to Download Queue. When ready, a download button will appear, which will allow you to save a .tar.gz file to your computer.
