Just before making any major changes to your hosting/email package, it is wise to make a backup. If after the changes it turns out that everything is fine, you can delete the backup again to save disk space. We also backup all your mail, websites and databases daily and keep it for you for 7 days. In the following article, we explain how you can manually create your own backup outside the standard backups.
Login on Plesk Control Panel
- In My Cloud86 (link), click in the left menu on My Services.
- Click the 3 dots behind the web hosting package you want to see in Plesk and click View Details.
- Under the heading Manage Webhosting (middle of the page), click on Websites & Domains.
- You will now be automatically logged into the Plesk Control Panel.
For the full manual with images, follow Login to Plesk
Making a Backup
- In Plesk, in the right menu click on Backup & Restore.
- In the new window, click on the Back up button. You'll also see in this window the backups that are already there and the backups that we make for you (you can't delete them yourself, nor do they take up any space).
- In the new screen, you choose which data you want to backup. We'll go over the settings below:
Backup content
- Back up
- Configuration: this option is checked by default
- Mail messages: this backs up all your email and settings.
- User files and databases: if you also want to save the databases of all websites.
- Store in
- Server storage: you can choose to store your backups in an external location. The backup is then written away using FTP.
- Type
- Full: choose (preferably) this option if you want a full backup of all your data.
- Incremental: this only backs up all changes since the last backup. Generally, this option is not used when making manual back ups.
Backup settings
- Comments: you can optionally specify a name for the backup here. For example: update WordPress.
- Exclude log files: Check this option if you do not want to backup your website's log files.
- Exclude specific files from the backup: This option allows you to exclude certain files from the backup.
- When a backup task is completed send a notification email to: when the backup is finished, an email will be sent to this email address.
Then as a final step, click OK and the backup will now be created! The duration of a backup can vary greatly and depends on the size of your website, databases and e-mail mailboxes. For example, a backup of 50GB can easily take an hour. If you have that much data on your web hosting package, check the last option and have an email sent to you when the backup is complete.
To restore this backup, see Restoring Backup via Plesk.
Download Plesk backup for later
You can download a complete backup from Plesk and later restore it to Plesk as well. This can be useful, for example, if you cancel the web hosting with us and want to come back later. The steps for downloading a Plesk backup are as follows:
- In Plesk, click in the right menu on Backup & Restore.
- Click on the date/time of the backup that you want to download.
- Under Details click on Download.
Upload Plesk backup
- In Plesk, click in the right menu on Backup & Restore.
- Click on Upload and select the backup file that you made earlier.
Note: that the maximum size of the backup should not exceed 2GB for uploading. If you want to restore a larger backup you must contact the help desk and send a download link of the backup.
Troubleshooting
Message: The backup was created and can be restored, although some minor issues occurred. lscache/.cm.log: Cannot open: Permission denied
During the restoration, cache files were restored that do not match. This is a notification from Plesk, but it does not affect the functioning of the website and can therefore be ignored.
If you need some help, you can always reach our support desk by email support@cloud86.io and on weekdays from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm you can also reach us by phone and via the chat in My Cloud86.