Back up and restore a website

Sheernox hosting is backed up automatically every day to separate storage in Canada. You can restore a whole website, or only some of its files and databases, yourself from the control panel.

See a website’s backups

Open Websites, select the website and select Backups in its navigation bar.

A website's Backups page listing two backups, each with its date, a MANUAL label, its size and a Restore button. The newest backup's Restore menu is open with Full website and Custom. Marker 1 is beside the Backup now button, marker 2 beside the open Restore menu and marker 3 beside the MANUAL label.

Each backup shows when it was taken and its size. Backups you take yourself are labelled MANUAL marker 3; hover over the note icon beside the label to read the note you added.

Restore a whole website

Find the backup to go back to and select its Restore button, then Full website marker 2.
Read the confirmation. It shows the date of the backup and warns that every change made since then will be lost.
Select Restore.

A full restore puts back all the website’s files and databases. You cannot make changes to the website while it runs.

Restore only some files or databases

The Custom restore page for a backup. Marker 1 is beside the Files and Databases cards, each showing how many items are selected, and marker 2 beside the list of files in the backup with a checkbox on each row.

Select the backup’s Restore button, then Custom.
Select a card at the top marker 1 to choose what to restore from: Files for the website’s files, or Databases for its databases.
Tick the items to restore marker 2. For files, open folders in the tree on the left to find the file or folder you need.
Select Restore now at the bottom of the page.

Database users are restored only when you restore all of the website’s databases together. If you restore just some databases, their users stay as they are now.

Take a backup before big changes

Before an update, a migration or a large edit, take a backup yourself so you can go back to exactly that moment:

On the website’s Backups page, select Backup now marker 1.
Add a short Backup note, such as “before theme update”.
Select Backup now.

The backup appears in the list when it is finished.

Keep your own copy

The automatic backups are there to help you recover. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose as well, stored somewhere other than your hosting account:

On the website’s overview, use Download in Quick links to save Download website data and Download email data.
Export each database regularly.
Keep copies of important email in your mail app or an archive.
Keep one copy off-site, for example in cloud storage.

Your responsibilities for backups are set out in the Terms of Service.