How to backup your website

With our optimized hosting plans, there are two built-in methods you may use to back up your website.

Plesk Backup Manager:

• Pro: It has an incremental option, allowing you to save on storage at your remote storage location
• Pro: It can be configured to backup all website files and databases, as well as emails
• Con: It uses the ZSTD format, making it harder to extract data from. Details.
• Con: Because it creates a backup of all domains and sites in your account, if you’re not using the Plesk UI to restore the data, it can be more difficult to determine what parts you need to restore it.

1-click web apps backups:

• Pro: Backups are stored as standard zip files, making them easy to extract and find the data within
• Pro: Each backup is a single web app (site) including its files and database, which means restoring them manually is easier than Plesk’s backup option
• Con: Does not include emails or any account settings.

Both backup solutions support saving backups to a few different cloud hosting solutions like Google Drive. Read on for more details on how to configure each type of backup along with our recommended settings.

We create daily disaster recovery backups that are completely separate from both backup tools described in this article, however as described in section 10 of our terms of service we are not liable for your data. You may request a restore from our disaster recovery backups, however restores may take up to 24 hours (Mon-Fri) to complete and recovery fees might be applicable. Because of these limitations, we strongly recommend creating your own backups using one of the tools described here so you have backups you can access yourself, whenever you need them, and at an external location!

Creating Backups with Plesk Backup Manager

Here’s how to use the Plesk Backup Manager to back up your website’s files & databases, emails, and Plesk configuration all in one.

• To get started, Log in to Plesk
• Once in Plesk, choose Account > Backup My Account and Websites. TIP: if you have your own VPS and want to backup the whole server, please go to Tools & Settings > Backup Manager and configure these backup settings there.
• Choosing to backup to a cloud storage provider is required on shared hosting. It also ensures you have an off-site backup of your websites and emails. This is done by selecting “Remote Storage Settings”. Here you can choose to backup to an FTPS server, Dropbox, Google Drive, or Amazon S3. Simply click on the service you wish to use to configure the connection from Plesk. Tip: any Amazon S3 API compatible storage provider works with the S3 option! We recommend Canadian-hosted EazyBackup E3.
• Choose “Schedule”
• Options as Follows:
  • [Schedule Only] Choose the option to “Activate this backup task”
  • [Schedule Only] If you are backing up to remote storage, you can choose the schedule of your choice. If you’re backing up to local storage we recommend a schedule like this:
    • Weekly Incremental (choose a random day of the week) at a time between 10pm and 4am.
    • Full Monthly kept for 1 month
  • Back Up: allows you to choose what you wish to backup. Files and Databases refers to all websites within the subscription, including WordPress apps.
  • Store in: to avoid situations where local backups can use up all of your available storage and cause problems with your website, we recommend choosing “Remote Storage” then selecting whichever remote storage option you set up earlier in this guide.
  • Type: we recommend enabling incremental backups to save on disk space, however non-incremental backups are simpler to restore from if you need to manually restore them to a new Plesk server/account.
  • Multivolume: it’s best to enable the option “Create a multivolume backup, volume size (MB)”. The default value should work fine.
• Exclude options:
  • Exclude log files: we recommend checking this box.
  • Exclude specific files from the backup: we recommend checking this box and entering the following path (if it’s not already there):
    • /application_backups/*
• Click OK or Apply to save your changes. All set!

Incremental backups mean that Plesk will take one large complete backup of everything you specified on the first run, then each of the next backups will contain only the changed files between when the complete backup was taken and now. This way each of your backups don’t need to fully duplicate all of the data, saving you disk space.

Creating Backups with 1-Click Web Apps

Advantage: simple singular web app backup and restore

• To get started, Log in to Plesk and select “1-click web apps” or Installatron
• Find the app you wish to backup in the list. If you have an app installed, but it’s not showing here, you can import your app.
• To create a backup now:
  • Click the Backup button beside that app
  • Choose “Add a New Backup Location” then select the type of remote storage you’d like to use. Tip: any Amazon S3 API compatible storage provider works with the S3 option! We recommend Canadian-hosted EazyBackup E3.
• To schedule a backup:
  • Click the Edit button > Settings > Auto-Backup
  • Set your preferred schedule. For example, 3 daily backups means to store one backup per day for 3 days, and not 3 backups per day.
  • Choose “Add a New Backup Location” then select the type of remote storage you’d like to use. Tip: any Amazon S3 API compatible storage provider works with the S3 option! We recommend Canadian-hosted EazyBackup E3.
• Click Save All. If you opted to use a cloud storage provider for backups, you will now be prompted to log in to the cloud storage provider so as to allow 1-click web apps access to store its backups there. Follow the prompts to complete the configuration.

How to Download a Backup

These steps will show you how to save one of the backups to your computer so you have a copy saved offline. This is most often done either for extra redundancy of your site data, or just prior to removing a site from Plesk. If you have your backups connected to a cloud services provider, you should also be able to login to that cloud service to download the backup directly from them. There will only be backups to download if you have, at some point in the past, configured a backup solution using the guide above.

How to Download a Plesk Backup

• To get started, Log in to Plesk
• Once in Plesk, choose Account > Backup My Account and Websites. If you have your own VPS and use whole server backups, go to Tools & Settings > Backup Manager instead
• In the list of backups, click on whichever backup you wish to download
• Click the link that says “Download”

Plesk’s version of this guide can also be found here.

How to Download a 1-Click Web Apps Backup

• To get started, Log in to Plesk and select “1-click web apps” or Installatron
• Choose the Backups tab
• Find the app in the list that you wish to save a backup of
• Click the downward pointing arrow to download that backup. The larger the site/app the longer it will take to download.

Backup Best Practices & Tips

1-click backup quotas

On shared servers 1-click web apps has the following quotas:

• Local storage: maximum 1GB and 2 backups per application
• Off-Site storage: maximum 2 backups per application (regardless of size)
• Cloud Storage: the maximum capacity of your cloud service (like OneDrive or Dropbox) with no limits on # of backups.

As a result of this, the off-site or cloud storage option is strongly recommended.

Plesk VPS Users: If you have your own VPS, quotas will not be automatically applied so keep an eye on your backup storage!

Picking one backup solution is generally best

When it comes to scheduling backups, it is strongly recommended to choose only one of the above two backup options.

Avoid using other backup software

Anything that runs within your provided web hosting space (like a WordPress plugin) is inherently limited by the resources applied to your hosting account as a whole, such as timeouts and memory limitations, and will likely not function as reliably as the tools described above, which operate at the server-level: independent from your web hosting resources.

If you’ve got a backup plugin that you like and you’re confident works well, feel free to continue using it as long as it’s configured to backup to an external storage location like an FTP server or cloud service like DropBox. However, note that because we already supply multiple methods of backing up your website, we can not supply support for 3rd party backup utilities. The plugin’s developer is your only avenue for support.

Using a 3rd party backup service that creates backup files *within your web hosting storage* is not permitted and we reserve the right to remove your backup files and any plugins generating those backup files at any time.

If you still wish to use a 3rd party backup service, despite the warnings above, be sure to disable 1-click web apps and Plesk backups.