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Joomla and WordPress Backup Services

All of our hosting plans include daily backup services. Rest assured that your Joomla and WordPress sites have backups within the last 14 days. 

The Managed Backup Service Includes

  1. Daily incremental backup of your files
  2. Every 12 hours we dump your database to disk
  3. 14 Day Retention Policy
  4. We retain database backups in /backup/database/ folder for 7 days. Our scripts will remove databases that are 7 days old or older.
  5. All retained Database Backups are moved to backup servers. It's possible to recover up to 14 days and every 12 hours snapshots of your database.

Important information about our backup services for our shared hosting servers

  • We keep one full backup of any new site on our network.
  • Backup happens automatically - we do give you tools to force backup but if you forget, we provide managed backup services for all our clients.
  • Incremental backup - Daily incremental backup of any changed or newly-created files.
  • Incremental backups are moved to a separate data center on a separate backup server.  We use R1soft to manage this process.
  • We can restore a client site to any point in time within the last fourteen days. This includes both the database and the files.
  • We dump your database to /backup. /backup/database/yyyy-mm-dd_hh-00/db.sql.bz and on rotation keep last 5 active. 
  • Login to SFTP or FTP to /backup in the same directory as /httpdocs and locate your dumped databases
  • After a full 14 day cycle of hosting we keep up to 70 copies of each sites database on R1 soft.
  • All backups are moved to a separate data center on a LAN network for security of our network.
  • File Restores are Managed by CloudAccess.net.  Submit a ticket or call our team and we will restore files or database. 

Frequently asked Questions for shared hosting backup

How far back can you restore my site?

We can restore a client site to any point in time within the last fourteen days. If a file was changed or a mistake is made and a file is deleted, our team can get the data back!

Can you explain to me how you backup my Joomla and WordPress database on shared hosting?

We dump a snapshot of the database one time every day and store the file in /backup ( In detail at /backup/database/yyyy-mm-dd_hh-00/db.sql.bz as packaged file. The snapshot of the database is completed right before the backup of your files is complete, and it is moved off the client’s production server and to our backup servers as part of the backup process. Remember, databases must be dumped to disk as a file then moved off to backup.
We manage this process as part of our platform. If clients need a restore of their database, CloudAccess.net will have five copies of .SQL files in the client’s home directory under /backup and up to fourteen copies of the .SQL files placed on our backup servers.
Clients can restore a database on their own, or our team can take this database file and restore it for them. The restoration of specific tables or columns is not part of our standard service. For advanced restoration procedures, we will perform a specialized restoration service for sub-sets of data from a .SQL file.

What is the example Command we use to dump the MySQL database?

We automate this process for you as part of our shared platform.  You do not need to run this command but for advanced users that want to understand how we manage our shared hosting you can see that we complete the same task you would if you ran your own production server.

mysqldump -pxxx -uyour_username -hdb --lock-tables=false database_name | bzip2 -9 > db.sql.bz
*We do allow SSH access to our Joomla! Platform. Clients can run this command manually to backup a site or they can use our Cloud Control Panel in the Administration area (the back end) of the Joomla! site. If clients do run this command in SSH on our platform, the command will dump the .SQL file to the current working directory. 

What directory are you storing my dumped databases?

Files are named by year, month, day, and hour of the backup and are packaged as BZip. You must use FTP,SFTP,SSH to manually grab these files. The Cloudaccess.net team can easily restore these files for you if required. Submit a ticket if you want us to restore a certain database. BZip is an industry standard for keeping dumped .SQL files. We do not dump your database to the same directory as your Joomla site. Its up one level in the ftp directory tree. Look carefully if your trying to search for your files. Example paths are located below. Example when you login to ftp,SFTP,SSH backups are located in /backup/database/ and then the year and date folders are listed out. Click on folders to see your raw MySQL file dump. /.cagefs.cron
/.cagefs.screen
/.cagefs.tmp
/httpdocs  <<< folder site is located inside of
/backup/database/yyyy-mm-dd_hh-00/db.sql.bz  <<< List of databases are located in /backup/database then look for the folder by date you need.

What is your Database Retention Policy?

When our scripts run each day we will dump the latest database snapshot to disk. We will retain only the last five days’ backups in /backup/database/ folder. However we do move your dumped databases to our remote backup servers. So they are not only dumped to the local disk for easy retrievel and backup but our R1sot moves incrental new copies of the database to our remote backup servers. Each copy of the database is moved offsite and kept for an addtional 14 days. If clients end up needing a database older than five business days, they must submit a ticket to our support team to have the older database pulled out of our backup systems.

How do you restore your data?

We provided 100% managed restorations of your site for our shared hosting customers. Clients do not need to be technologically savvy to get their site restored with CloudAccess.net. Let our team handle and restore the files and database if a mistake is made or something happens as a result of an accident. If clients need to restore data to a specific point in time, open a support ticket and our team will provide a managed restore of files, database, or both.

Is my backup on the same server as my hosting server?

Backups are on a seperate network, seperate data center, and seperate server. All very important if you are to carefully handle anyones data. Our backups are transferred between application web servers and back-end backup systems over a secure, dedicated, and private network built to handle backups. The software that handles our shared hosting services is called R1soft. We have a seperate internal LAN and a separate network interface card dedicated for backups. Data is not passed over the Internet or in a way anyone could get access to the backup data.

Is the backup service free with my hosting account?

We do not charge a service fee for backups. Backups are provided as a convenience to our clients. We allow and encourage clients to make additional backups of their site locally using our Cloud Control Panel or FTP. Even though we do backups for our clients, we still suggest they keep their own copies. Clients can never be too safe with data.   Joomla is Open Source Platform that allows you to keep local copies of your data or you could get creattive and use alternate ways to backup your data, ,like a cron job that moves data off site, or a remote serverst that logs in using FTP or SFTP to crab the backups off our shared servers.  If you need a alaternate solution for backup call our staff and we will give you best cases advise on how to automate your own backup.  If you search around the extensions directory you can find a few backup resources that are popular.  We had hear much success with a software package called Akeeba backup.

How can I backup my site locally?

There are two options for backing up a site manually and locally to a disk. Option 1 is  point-and-click and very user-friendly. Option 2 requires clients to use an FTP client software. These Options are expanded upon below. We suggest a free and easy-to-use tool called filezilla. Download Filezilla now.

  • Option 1 - Point and Click GUI

    From the Cloud Control Panel located within your Joomla! Administration area, clients can take a manual snapshot of their site, and save a copy of it locally to their disk with a point and a click. The system allows clients to separately download both the files and the database to their local computer.

  • Option 2 - FTP Backup

    We allow clients to backup their site using FTP. Clients must locate their welcome letter for log in info or submit a ticket asking how to gain access. Clients will want to backup anything they see in /backups and /httpdocs. Database dumps are located in /backups and client Joomla! applications and files are located in /httpdocs. We always suggest that clients keep a local backup separate from our own managed backups. Clients can never be too safe with data. Joomlla! is a free Open Source CMS, and CloudAccess.net values Open Data Standards. Therefore, we encourage clients to keep the Joomla! application that they own safely in their own hands.

Do you charge for bandwidth on backups?

We do not charge clients bandwidth usage for any data that is moved for backup purposes on our private network. Our backups work on a managed internal network that is privately secure and not connected to how we bill for network usage.

What software does CloudAccess.net use for backup?

We use R1Soft Continuous Data Protection® 3.0 Enterprise Edition to manage our backups. R1soft has been writing backup software for over a decade. Our block level backup systems keep client sites running fast and keep our servers serving data rather then taking up precious IO on scraping the disk for backup. Old systems like Rsynch, or running copy commands via SSH, take a toll on disk IO. Instead, we have advanced technology that takes an inventory of changed files at the block level, and when it’s time to back it up, the technology only moves the files that have changed. We call this incremental block level backup. Most hosting companies use non-block-level backups that scrape the disk causing issues with the server and eating up much needed disk IO. The goal at CloudAccess.net is to make sure data is safe, disks are free to serve your data, and that backups are completed and ready when clients have an emergency.

When are backups taken?

Backups are completed every day on automated schedules. Backups times may vary based on what area of the network clients are located on when the backup machines allocate time to take the data. If you have concerns about a particilar sites scheduled backup times - submit ticket asking about a single site. Remember if you have several sites on our network,one site could be on alternate server and backed up at a differnt time.

Does a human check the backups?

We are a very active hosting company and our servers are checked every few hours by a staff member that does day-to-day work for clients who request restores. We also have R1Soft running automatically in addition to staff members who monitor the backup system and run daily checks.

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