How to Back Up and Restore Your Website

Regular backups are your safety net against accidental deletions, bad updates, or hacking attempts. Plesk makes it easy to create, download, and restore full backups of your website and database.

1. Creating a Manual Backup

1. Log into Plesk and go to Websites & Domains.
2. Click Backup Manager for your domain.
3. Click Back Up.
4. Choose what to include: website files, databases, mail, and configuration. For a full safety net, select everything.
5. Choose where to store it — locally on the server, or an external storage location (FTP, cloud storage) if configured.
6. Click OK to start the backup.

Larger sites can take several minutes to back up — you'll see the backup listed once it's complete.

2. Scheduling Automatic Backups

1. In Backup Manager, click Scheduled Backup Settings.
2. Enable scheduling and choose a frequency (daily, weekly, or monthly).
3. Set how many backups to keep — older ones are automatically deleted once the limit is reached.
4. Click OK to save.

3. Downloading a Backup

Click the download icon next to any backup in the list to save a local copy to your computer — a good habit before major changes like a theme or plugin update.

4. Restoring From a Backup

1. In Backup Manager, find the backup you want to restore.
2. Click the backup's name, then choose what to restore (all files, just the database, etc.).
3. Click Restore and confirm.

Important: restoring overwrites your current files and/or database with the backed-up version. If you're unsure, download and inspect the backup first, or open a support ticket and our team can help.

Best Practices

• Keep at least one backup stored off-server (downloaded locally or in cloud storage) in case of a server-level issue.
• Always back up before major changes: theme switches, plugin updates, PHP version changes.
• Test that your backups actually work by periodically restoring to a staging environment if you run a critical business site.