How to backup your Website using Filezilla FTP
Have you ever backed up your website before? If not, you need to start doing so, right now. I’ve prepared a step-by-step tutorial to show you how to use the free FTP tool Filezilla to download a backup copy of your website. If you missed my introduction to FTP, please read it first.
Before we start
I’m going to assume you’ve already downloaded your free copy of Filezilla and made a note of your website’s FTP account information, namely:
- Your FTP host name
- Your FTP user name
- Your FTP password
If you haven’t done this yet, you’ll need to do so in order to follow the rest of the tutorial.
For your final preparation step, go to your ‘My Documents’ folder on your PC and right-click, then choose ‘New > Folder’ and give your folder the name of your website (e.g. thinkdave.com).
A quick introduction to the Filezilla interface
Double click the Filezilla icon on your desktop or in your Start menu. This will open the Filezilla application on your PC.
If you can’t find the icon, try looking in C:Program Files > Filezilla FTP Client > Filezilla
Once you’ve opened the program, you should be presented with the window below (my screenshots may look a little different as they were captured from the Mac version of Filezilla)
The Filezilla interface is split into a number of panes. If you’re running the default view (which you should be), you’ll see 6 panes, namely:
- The message log: Tells you the status of the connection to your FTP server.
- The local directory tree. A list of the files on your computer.
- The remote directory tree. A list of the files on the remote computer (your web server).
- The local directory list. These are the files that you can actually choose to upload to the web server.
- The remote directory list. These are the files that you can choose to download from the web server.
- The transfer queue. This details what files are queued for transfer and what their current status is.
Setting up your site with the Filezilla Site Manager
In order for Filezilla to transfer files from your web server to your computer, you need to tell it where the files can be found. This is done by entering your FTP account information into Filezilla’s Site Manager. You can open the Site Manager by clicking File > Site Manager.
In the Site Manager’s site window on the left (I’ve greyed out my client sites in this example) you can list a number of Websites to manage. In this example though, we’re only going to manage one website.
- Click on the New Site icon. In the site window, a new listing called ‘New Site’ will appear. Click on the rename icon and change the name to your website name (e.g. thinkdave.com). Hit the Enter key on your keyboard to save the change.
- In the ‘Host’ box on the right, enter your website’s host name (e.g. www.thinkdave.com). Leave the ‘Port’ box empty and make sure the ‘Servertype’ is set to FTP - File Transfer Protocol.
- In the ‘Logontype’ box, open up the dropdown menu on the right and select ‘Normal’.
- In the ‘User’ box, enter your FTP user name.
- In the ‘Password’ box, enter your password. Because the password is not shown as alphanumeric characters, it’s a good idea to enter your password again in the ‘Comments’ box (don’t do this if you’re concerned that someone with malicious intentions may get access to your PC).
- Click the ‘OK’ icon to save your changes and connect to your Website’s FTP account. It stands to reason that you need to be connected to the Internet for the rest of the FTP connection to work.
Advanced settings
Re-open the Site Manager (File > Site Manager) and click on the ‘Advanced’ tab. One of the options is ‘Defauly Local Directory’. Save yourself some time by clicking on the ‘Browse’ icon and finding your folder that you set up earlier in the My Documents directory of your PC.
Doing this makes sure Filezilla automatically detects the local destination folder of your website every time you establish an FTP connection, which is what we’re going to do right now.
Click on the ‘Connect’ icon in the Site Manager to start your FTP connection.
Establish an FTP connection
If you’ve done everything properly, you should see a list of commands in your Message log, telling you what’s happening. Because the message log throws a lot of jargon at you, Filezilla colour-codes it’s logs. In this case, green means you’re connecting to your FTP server, red means there are problems.
If you see a message ‘Directory listing successful’ and a group of files and folders appear in the remote directory list (right middle pane), you’re connected.
Backup your website to your destination folder
The next step make take a bit of digging. In your web server pane there will either be a list of files/folders relating to your website, or you may need to open a sub-folder to find your files. Common sub-folder names are httpdocs or www, but your files could be anywhere.
A good indication that you’ve found your website’s files is when you come across a folder containing an index file. Normally you’ll see some files that definitely seem related to your site, e.g. about-us, or products.
Once you’ve found this folder, click on any item, then select all the items in that folder (CTRL+A) or just the ones you want to backup.
Finally, make sure that your destination folder in the local directory list is open, then right-click on any of your selected files in the remote directory folder and click ‘Download’.
If you’ve set everything up correctly you should start seeing your files transferring from the right of the screen to the left.
Note: If you’ve done this before and you are making a second backup of the website, you may be asked whether you want to overwrite existing files in the local directory. Usually I would recommend choosing ‘Overwrite if newer’ unless you want to completely overwrite your old files.
Conclusion
Congratulations. Your website is now backed up to a folder in your My Documents folder on your PC. You can now close Filezilla. Your FTP account settings will be saved and waiting for your next backup session.
Please bear in mind that we have only backed up the Website’s files. If you are running a database driven Website you’ll need to backup your database. This is done using a completely different set of tools, which we’ll get to in another tutorial.
Now all you have to do is make a second backup copy of the local folder to a CD or removable drive, just in case your computer decides to blow up.
If you have any questions or problems, please let me know in the comments.
14 Comments For This Post
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(Anti) Social-Lists - 9/14/08 | (Anti) Social Development (September 14th, 2008 at 9:31 pm)
[...] Wilkinson posted an awesome tutorial on how to backup your website via ftp with Filezilla. He’s got a lot of other useful information on his website, so it’s worth reading some [...]
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How to Upgrade Wordpress Manually | (Anti) Social Development (October 9th, 2008 at 9:07 pm)
[...] so I have them while upgrading. You should be backing up these files on a regular basis as well. Thinkdave has a great guide to using ftp with [...]
Thanks very much for the article! Quick q - what have I done wrong when I see ‘create directory’ as only unghosted option, when I right click to download the files?
Hi Tracy. Thanks for the question. I’ve responded by email. Hope it helps.
Hi Dave,
Posting reply here in case it helps anyone with similar issue - I think it was ghosted ‘cos I was right-clicking and doing select all on a sub folder within the folder I was trying to backup. When I right-clicked on the file below and chose select all, the download action was available.
Thanks all the same!
Tracy
Great. Glad you figured it out and thanks for coming back to us.
By the way, soulambition.co.uk is a great looking site. Good luck with it.
Hi Dave -
Great tutorial. I know a number of people who need instructions in getting started with FTP and in backing up their websites and this is definitely a resource to which I will direct them.
Do you know of an automated solution for doing this? Can it only be done via a cron job? I suppose I would still need to download it because the file would be too big to then be emailed to me.
Also, are you aware of the WP Database backup plugin? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/ This can be set to back up the database on a set schedule. I have mine emailed to me daily and since I use gmail filtered to the trash. Since the trash is stored for 30 days before gmail deletes it, I then have a month’s worth of db backups. I wrote about this recently at http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/2008/08/15/dont-rely-on-your-host-and-lose-your-blog-backup-wordpress/
Thanks!
Thanks Kim, great idea on the Gmail solution. I never thought of that. Other than the WordPress db-backup solution for my clients’ WordPress sites, I don’t use any automated services.
I’ve made a habit of setting aside a few hours each month to perform backups manually and I think that manual backups are actually a good thing. Because I get bored watching Filezilla download, I generally spend time browsing the site I’m backing up, and I make notes of things to add/remove/edit in the following month. For retainer based clients, this is an important part of my service.
If more website owners actually visited and read the content on their own site each month, they’d definitely make more updates, and I’d bet good money that they’d increase their site traffic as a result.
I am having trouble connecting to my sites FTP server, it seems to connect to the site and accepts the login username but is failing when trying to authenticate the pw. My site is built on zen cart and hosted on godaddy…which login and pw am i supposed to use? I would of assumed zen cart and have tried both and also created a new login and pw on godaddy -as a ftp user…but no luck with that either…
thanks for you help!
great explanations.
Just too embarassed to give you my Website name. I used Wordpress and created some pages and posts with it. As you probably know, Wordpress just created a new version. I want to start an other blog instead, so connecting to the cpanel, I think I need to update Wordpress. That would affect the site I already started.
Because I never used Filezilla when doing the website, I have no file saved in it. So now I am trying to learn how to back-up the files I already created using Wordpress, to back them up into Filezilla.
I was hoping to backup using filezilla so I would be safe to update Wordpress to the newest version.
Would really appreciate an answerif you get a chance.
Thanks
J.
You immediately sent me a very useful blog as answer. I wonder how you did that.
And I’d like to subscribe to both your blog and the anti social-lists you sent to me. Dave, I wonder if you have some explanations how to subscribe to rrs feeds?
Thanks
Jame
@ap When you try the username and password, Filezilla should spit out an error message in red. If you’re getting a 550 error, it means that your username and password are wrong. I don’t think your zen cart settings are going to work. The FTP info you got from GoDaddy will be what’s needed. If you still have problems email me a screenshot, or your FTP info and I’ll have a try for you.
@Jame when you log into your cPanel account you should be able to find your FTP hostname, user name and password. Once you’ve got these, follow the tutorial and you should be able to backup the site. I think cPanel user websites are stored in the public_html directory (you should see this as an option when you log in using FTP)
As for your questions about RSS feeds, there is a very good explanation of what RSS is over at Problogger. This article will also explain how to subscribe to an RSS feed. Here’s the link: http://www.problogger.net/what-is-rss/
I hope this helps. If you need any more assistance, please let me know.
If you don’t already, you should write tutorials for hosting companies. This is *really* helpful. Mind you, I still don’t know if I did it all correctly or if I did what I “need” to do, but I got better information here than I did through Siteground’s or Hostgator’s tutorials.
Filezilla was even all in Italian and I could follow your steps.
Thank you.
Hi, I have a question.
Can we export all the files ,folder and subfolder to a .xls file ?
@cherrye thanks for the compliment. If there are any hosting companies out there looking for a technical writer, I’m available. hehe.
@Inchung Not sure what you mean, but I don’t think you’re talking about http://FTP. You may want to back up to a hard drive, CD/DVD or Flash drive, but there’s no way you can export files to a .csv.