How to backup your website

Documentation File Management and FTP
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Good website administration requires making backups of your account regularly and storing them somewhere safe yourself. You also need to download backups in order to migrate website to other hosting accounts.

InfinityFree does not create or store any backups of free hosting accounts. It’s your responsibility to regularly create backups, and to store them somewhere safely.

Backup your website files

The best way to backup your website files is by downloading them using a desktop FTP client.

  1. Open an FTP connection to your account (more info).
  2. Find the htdocs folder of the website you’re trying to back up.
  3. Download the htdocs folder to your computer. In FileZilla, this is as easy as dragging the htdocs directory from the pane on the right to the left.

If you have a large website, it may take a long time for the download to complete. This is normal. Just start the transfer and let it run in the background. If some of the transfers fail, simply retry them until all files have been transferred successfully.

Backup your databases

You can download database backups through phpMyAdmin.

  1. Login to the control panel of your account.
  2. Click the phpMyAdmin button.
  3. Click the Connect Now button next to the database you would like to download.
  4. Go to the Export tab.
  5. Click the Start button.

Note about generating ZIP files on the server

Some file managers have the option to create and extract ZIP files of your website “on the server”.

However, note that the file managers use FTP, and FTP does not support managing archives on the target server. This means the file manager creates or extracts the zip file on the file manager server, similar to how you can create or extract archives on your own computer.

Additionally, web based file managers are not good at dealing with large archives, and may break while handling the archives.

Finally, please note that there is a file size limit of 10 MB on free hosting, so you may not be able to package your entire website on your hosting account.

Note about backup scripts

Some CMS have a built-in backup options, or have plugins which can make backups. We recommend against using such tools.

While backup plugins look easy to use, they often involve running extremely complex PHP code to generate the backups. These backup scripts frequently break down because of file size limits or PHP execution time limits, leading to incomplete or corrupt backups. They also generate a high server load when creating or restoring backups, which may cause other problems for your website.

And even if the backup scripts completes successfully, you may run into similar issues when restoring the backup, which may result in you having a backup you can’t restore anywhere.

This is why you should not use backup tools and plugins, and always create backups with FTP and phpMyAdmin.

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Is there a video explaining the entire process? From downloading the backup copy to uploading to the new hosting

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There is a video on using FileZilla in that guide, but I don’t think there is one for the entire process though. Maybe I’ll make on in a few weeks / months if I find the time and motivation :joy:

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InfinityFree doesn’t have video tutorials for anything, including this.

Also, in my opinion, the most difficult part of the process is finding and updating the configuration of the website to use the new database settings and domain, and that part is highly specific to the website software you’re using, so there isn’t really a way to have a generic step-by-step guide for it.

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