How to Create and Restore a Backup in cPanel

Every hosting company says they run backups. Most customers assume that means they’re covered and never think about it again — until something goes wrong and they need to actually use one.

Here’s what you actually need to know: what we back up, how long we keep it, how to create your own backup before you do something risky, and how to restore when things go sideways.

What HostDango Backs Up and For How Long

We run automated backups of all shared hosting accounts. Backups are retained for 30 days, which means on any given day you can restore to a snapshot from any point in the last month.

What’s included in a full account backup:

• All files in your hosting account — your website files, email, logs, everything in your home directory
• All databases associated with your account
• Email forwarders and filters
• Cron jobs
• DNS zone files
• SSL certificates

What backups don’t protect against: deleting something and not noticing for more than 30 days. If you accidentally deleted a file 45 days ago and you’re just now realizing it, it’s gone from our backups. This is why keeping your own local backups of critical data is still a good practice regardless of what your host provides.

To restore from our server-side backups, open a support ticket with the date you want to restore to and what you need restored — a specific file, a database, or the full account. We’ll handle it from there.

Creating Your Own Backup in cPanel

Beyond what we run automatically, you can create manual backups anytime through cPanel. This is especially useful before making significant changes — updating WordPress, switching themes, installing a new plugin, or anything else where you want a clean snapshot to roll back to if something breaks.

Full Account Backup

1. Log into cPanel
2. Under the Files section, click Backup
3. Under Full Backup, click Download a Full Website Backup
4. Under Backup Destination, select Home Directory — this saves the backup file to your hosting account itself
5. Enter your email address if you want a notification when it’s done
6. Click Generate Backup

The backup runs in the background. For larger accounts it can take several minutes. You’ll receive an email when it’s complete (if you entered your address). The backup file will appear in your home directory as a .tar.gz file — you can download it to your computer from the File Manager for safekeeping.

Important: Storing your backup in your home directory counts against your hosting storage quota. Download it to your local machine and then delete the file from the server to free the space back up. Don’t leave large backup files sitting on the server indefinitely.

Partial Backup — Just Files or Just Databases

If you only need to back up specific pieces — just your WordPress files, or just your database — cPanel’s Backup Wizard offers partial backups:

1. In cPanel under Files, click Backup Wizard
2. Click Back Up
3. Choose what to back up: Home Directory (all files) or MySQL Databases (databases only)
4. Select which database if you’re doing a partial database backup
5. Click Generate Download

Database backups download as .sql.gz files. These are smaller and faster to generate than a full account backup, which makes them ideal as a quick pre-update snapshot for WordPress.

Restoring From a Backup

Restoring Files

1. In cPanel, go to Backup Wizard → Restore → Home Directory
2. Click Choose File and select your .tar.gz backup file
3. Click Upload

cPanel will extract and restore the files. This overwrites existing files with the backed-up versions — it doesn’t delete files that exist on the server but weren’t in the backup.

Restoring a Database

1. In cPanel, go to Backup Wizard → Restore → MySQL Databases
2. Click Choose File and select your .sql.gz file
3. Click Upload

The database restore overwrites the existing database with the contents of the backup file. Make sure you’re restoring to the right database — if you have multiple WordPress installs on the same account, each one has its own database.

Before restoring a database: If your WordPress site is currently live and functioning and you’re restoring a database to fix a specific problem, take a fresh database backup first. Restoring an older database backup on a site that’s had content added since that backup will lose that content. Know what you’re rolling back to before you do it.

The Scenario You’ll Actually Use This For

The most common reason people need a restore isn’t a server failure — it’s a bad WordPress update. A plugin update breaks the site. A theme update conflicts with something. A well-intentioned customization goes wrong. You need to get back to five minutes ago.

The workflow that makes this painless:

1. Before updating anything significant, go to cPanel → Backup Wizard → Back Up → MySQL Databases → download your WordPress database
2. Do your update
3. If it breaks, go back to Backup Wizard → Restore → MySQL Databases → upload the file you just downloaded
4. Your site is back to exactly where it was

This takes about two minutes and has saved more sites than we can count. The file-level backup is less often needed for routine WordPress issues — database is usually where the problem lives — but having both is ideal before anything major.

When to Call Us Instead

If you need to restore from our server-side backups — going back to a date in the past rather than restoring from a file you created — that comes through support. We can restore:

• A specific file or folder from a past date
• A specific database from a past date
• Your entire account to a past date

When you open the ticket, tell us: what you need restored, what date you want to restore from, and whether you want us to restore over the current version or to a separate location so you can compare. The more specific you are, the faster we can turn it around.

Backups are there when you need them. The goal is making sure you know how to use them before you need them, not during the moment of panic when something’s broken and you’re trying to figure out cPanel for the first time.