Backups

The server backs up your whole account every night: website files, mail, and databases. The Backups page lets you use those backups yourself.

What you can do

• Create a backup now — a snapshot of your account as it is this minute, in addition to the nightly ones. At most one per hour; the three newest on-demand backups are kept.

• Download any backup as a standard .tar.gz archive, choosing what to include:

  Choice	Contents
  everything	files, mail, databases and account.json (see below)
  website files only	your home directory without the mail/ folder
  mail only	the mail/ folder (Maildir per mailbox) and your domains' DKIM keys
  databases only	a dump of each database and your database users

  Inside the archive:

  manifest.json              what is inside and when it was made
  account.json               your settings: domains with their DNS records, mailboxes,
                             forwarders, cron jobs, SSH public keys, PHP settings (no passwords)
  home/<account>/...         your files and mail (Maildir folders under mail/)
  mysql/<database>.sql       a dump of each of your databases
  mysql/users.sql            your database users
  dkim/<domain>.mp1.key      DKIM signing keys (mail and everything only)

  Keep a copy somewhere safe before big changes, or use it to move to another host: the DNS records in account.json are what you would recreate elsewhere.

• Restore your files and databases from a backup. This replaces your home directory (website files and mail) and the listed databases with their contents from that backup; anything created since is lost. Domains, mailboxes, SSH keys, cron jobs and settings are not changed. Because it is destructive, it asks for your account password and a confirmation.

Typical uses

• You broke the site with an update: restore from last night's backup, then redo the change carefully.
• Before a risky migration: Create a backup now, then proceed; restore if it goes wrong.
• Moving away or keeping an offline copy: Download and store the archive.

Nightly backups are listed as nightly, the ones you made yourself as on-demand. Times are shown in UTC.