Backup Your Drupal Database
Regular backups of your Drupal website is important to make sure you don't lose any data. All it takes is one hard disk to crash and you are down for the count. Here's a quick rundown on how to backup your Drupal database.
Most websites are hosted on shared hosting services and run on Linux boxes. All the major hosting companies use cPanel as the preferred administration panel. In addition, part of cPanel services is phpMyadmin, an extremely useful Mysql database admin application that allows you to administrate your database.
To backup a Drupal database, simply go to your cPanel page and look for the phpMyAdmin icon. Click on it and then select the database you want to backup in the left pane.
The screen should look something like this:
(click to open into a larger view)
Do exactly as shown in the screen. Select all tables to export and choose the SQL button. We want to generate all SQL commands to backup and restore our Drupal database. In the structure section, click the appropriate check boxes and do the same in the Data section.
Lastly, click on the Save as file check box and choose zipped format to make the download smaller and faster. For large databases the amount of SQL code can be huge.
Hit the Go button and wait patiently as the zip file is generated and downloaded to your computer. To unzip the file, use Winrar or Winzip.
Note:
Kobashi Computing cannot be responsible in the event of data loss. These instructions are informational purposes only.