Web backups are very important these days. I do not know one web developer who has not had a website they created hacked. It is truly inevitable. Whether it was a mass hack, in which a program aware of a security loop hole surfs the net and hacks away, or just a useless group of talent with too much time on their hands, getting hack is not fun. One way to be prepared for this is to have up to date backups of the file and database, if you use one, of your server. This quick tutorial will show you a quick way to backup your files and place them on your server for download later.

Now of course you do not want a backup in the same spot as the files it is backing up because that defeats the purpose but at least you can do this quickly and from different medians and then get around to downloading them with a FTP client later to another machine, device, storage unit or server. Here we go:

First you will need something to ssh or shell into your hosting. Most hosting supports ssh but may require a quick identification check in order to enable it. Either way, once you have the green light follow these steps and poof! BACKUPS! You can download a SSH client such as PuTTY here.

Next, launch the application and you will see the following window or one similar. Type in your website or web server's IP address into the box labeled "Host Name (or IP address) as I have done here. The "Port" is pretty standard but your hosting may change this. You can find it quickly in any support forums your hosting has if you feel this is the problem. Firewalls can also pose problems but unlikely.

Now a terminal window will pop up as follows. You will be prompted with "login as: " at which point you can type in your user name to your hosting. Next will be a prompt for password. When you type your password, nothing will show on the screen. Do not be alarmed. It is merely a security thing instead of places dots or (*). After you have entered it, press "Enter" or return and you should be in. There may be a prompt about an outdated key which is no problem. just type "yes" and not "y" when prompted to go to the next step. Type the following code as depicted in the screenshot and press enter. A list of every file will scroll through the screen until the backup is complete. Now you can come back to it as a later time and download the .tar.gz file. WinSCP is a free program to use for FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

#tar cvzf 21JAN2010.tar.gz your/site/folder/