Hello, this is Rob, I'm going to show you how to restore a website from a backup. It's all good and fine that I tell you how to backup your website, you can backup your website via the cPanel or the control panel, your host will do this backup for you. But you can't trust your host to do it, you'll have to do other backups. And I've given you some good examples of WordPress plugins you can use to backup your site to your own personal computer or to the cloud. So you have a copy in case anything goes wrong. Now this is not just for hacking.
This is for any reason your site might stop working at any time. And that's why backups are of immense importance for websites generally, as well as website security. Remember, there's two sites, the backups there's the database and the files. The database includes all the content For the website, all the words, the text, all the paths to the images, all the settings for the plugins and the themes, and the files are the WordPress installation files, the the WordPress software itself, as well as images or any other files that you've uploaded to your website to make it work. So we're going to start with the database. So you log into the cPanel and you find PHP my admin, you might not have a cPanel but you will have PHP myadmin so click on PHP myadmin so you will find your database in PHP myadmin you might see a database also called information schema, but the WordPress database is the one you want and they've got all the tables start with WP or something like that.
These are the what the tables look like. You'll have one called posts post meta options comment Comments matter, etc users user matter. Actually further down here, all of these wF tables, these are actually the wordfence tables, there's more wordfence tables than there are WordPress tables. So if you look into the posts, click on that table, you'll see all these cells, which has all the information to do with all your posts and pages. So the text in them and their numbers and IDs and author numbers, etc. So what I'm going to do is completely destroy this database, I'm going to check all the tables in the database, and I'm going to drop them.
Don't do this at home. So now we have no information in our database. So let's refresh the website. And we have nothing It gives us the install page because all it has is the WordPress software and it doesn't have the database it can't link to the database because the database isn't there. So we're gonna have to do something quick. Obviously, this site isn't working.
So we go back into our database, the shell of our database in PHP myadmin and import along here. And here, keep all of these as default because we're importing the former SQL. And I'm going to choose the file from the backup we did with the plugin back WP up to Dropbox. And there's an SQL file there, we're gonna select that, please bear in mind that the maximum is 50 megabytes here, if you have an older WordPress website, your database would be very much bigger, and then you'll have to use a shell command line application to re install the database. So we're going to click go at the bottom here and that will take a while to upload. And so here it says that the import has successfully finished 450 queries have been executed.
And there is the name of the backup database. So we've got all the tables back in the database. If we click on any of the tables, all of these entries are back in there. So let's go back to the homepage of the website. And there it is, again, few breathe a sigh of relief. It's all working, and it's all there correctly.
So it's great to find out how you can backup and restore database very important WordPress skill that you should have in your arsenal. But there's more, maybe you have a need to backup some of the files, maybe one of your files is corrupted. Or, of course you've been hacked and you need to go back to an earlier version, and then just restore from the files that you have from your backup. And you can do that via cPanel in file manager and you go into public HTML and If you have a look at all the files here, they will be the same as all the files here, apart from those four backup files, so anything you need to update, you can just upload. Select the file, select a random file from the backup, WP login. php.
Open that, and it'll say the following file already exists on the server. So we're backing up the same file with the same file. We'll go yes. And that has uploaded. So go back to the website, check. It's all working.
And there it is. Cause the better way of doing this would be with file Zilla or some sort of FTP program. Okay, so same again with the FTP remember we are accessing the server here via SFTP, which is the secure File Transfer Protocol. Same again, if we just wanted to update a file, maybe you want to update WP comments post, we've selected public HTML here, all the public HTML files down here. We can just drag that over. And again, we'll get the alert from file Zilla saying, there's already a file called with that name in that destination, do you want to overwrite it and we go Yes, we do.
And so then that we have backed up from that file. And you can do this with any number of files. You can do it with the whole file installation on public HTML on the root of the server. If you had a hack, then you can back up and go back in time essentially, to how your website was a week before and before the hack was completed, because remember, the hakko will be making changes to your website in order to To make money but he'll also say he's probably he not he. But the hacker will also put some sort of backdoor in. So even if you found the files that he had changed or inserted, you'll also have some sort of way of getting back into the site.
So the only way to make sure they don't get back in is just to have a complete restore of every file on your server in order to ensure that the hacker can't get back in or can't get back in more easily. So one last thing to do, we've done then restore, go back to the site, refresh, make sure it's all working, click on a few different pages, make sure everything's okay. And check out the WordPress back end, see if that's all working. And I hope that was all useful. How to restore from a backup, my name is Rob covenant. I'll see you in another video.