Making a backup of a Joomla site

The easy way and the hard way

You can backup your Joomla site in two ways: the 'easy way', with the help of a Joomla extension, or ‘the hard way’, by manually creating local copies of your website files/directories and database.

Although in most cases we recommend the first option – specifically with the help of the extension Akeeba Backup – in this article we’ll describe both methods.

Creating a backup with Akeeba Backup

Akeeba is the alpha and omega of Joomla backup solutions, and the most popular component on the JED. It's easy to setup and use, but for those that choose to delve deeper includes many advanced features ... from selective file exclusion, to offsite storage, to automatic scheduled backups. The list goes on.

There is both a free and a paid version: for basic usage the free version is perfectly sufficient, however for the more discerning backup-enthusiatic the paid version is a great investment and very much worth the money.

 

Creating a One-Click-Backup

Creating a One-Click-Backup is the simplest approach. With a minimum of fuss/setup Akeeba will create a backup of your site. No need to think about databases, files, whatever – it just works. Oh, and you can read about restoring this sort of backup here.

Let’s make a backup using Akeeba:

1. Hopefully, you already installed it from the Joomla Extension Directory (for help with that, check out this article)
2. Go to Components > Akeeba Backup
3. If this is the first time you’ve opened Akeeba Backup, you'll be welcomed with the following screen:

   

4. Click on Configuration Wizard and let it do its thing ...
5. Once it's done, you will be presented with Akeeba main screen

   

6. Akeeba Backup is packed with features, but let's focus on the Backup part
7. The easiest, one-click method of making a backup can be found by clicking on Default Backup Profile within One-Click Backup
8. Wait for it to finish…

   

9. Done! Easy, right?

Finding and restoring the backup

You can easily find your backup by clicking on the Manage Backups button in the Akeeba Backup main menu.

If you've created multiple backups you'll see a list of these here – any of these backups can be deleted, restored or downloaded and saved locally

Creating a manual Joomla backup

If you don’t feel like installing a backup component – or just like doing things the hard way – the process of creating a manual Joomla backup is pretty straightforward.

Roughly speaking, your Joomla site is made up of (i) a bunch of files/directories and (ii) a database. Both of these will need to be backed up separately.

Backing up your Joomla files/directories

You can simply use an FTP client to transfer all Joomla files and folders to your local drive (See how to use an FTP client)

Backing up your Joomla database

• You'll need to know your database name, username and password (one place to find these details in your main Joomla configuration.php file)
• Open phpMyAdmin, select your Joomla database and Export it.
•  Export option, select Custom

  

• Scroll down and within the Object Creation options, select the option Add DROP TABLE / VIEW / PROCEDURE / FUNCTION / EVENT / TRIGGER statement

  

• Click on GO and the database will be downloaded to your local computer

Your manual backup is complete!

Congratulations, you made a manual Joomla backup.

Here you can find more information about accessing/manipulating your database with phpMyAdmin.

Final thoughts

Keeping backups is an important part of developing anything, be it a website, an application or a video game. Things can always go wrong: with a backup, you can always take a step back and start from there – without losing time or code.