Doing A Manual Backup Of A Joomla Website Files Using cPanel:

Open a Browser and Login to cPanel as shown in Diagram 1.
ULR: yourwebsitename/cpanel

Diagram 1

The cPanel GUI will open in the Browser, scroll down midway and locate the File Manager icon under the head Files, as shown in Diagram 2.

Diagram 2

Double click the File Manager to navigate to the File Manager tool. A modal window will be displayed. Ensure that the radio button Web Root (public_html/www) is selected, as shown in Diagram 3.

Then Click .

Diagram 3

The File Browser will appear in the Browser window as shown in Diagram 4.

Diagram 4

Click the Select All check box, found at the top of the File Manager page, as shown in Diagram 4.

Immediately all the files and folders get selected as shown in Diagram 5.

Diagram 5

Next click the Compress Icon in the Tool bar at the top of the page, as shown in Diagram 5. The Compress modal window will appear in the Browser as shown in Diagram 6.

Diagram 6

Select the appropriate Compression type at the top of the modal window as shown in Diagram 6. Then in the text box at the bottom of the modal window enter a name for the compressed file. This can be changed to osvbackup1907201, i.e. the site name abbreviation followed by the word backup followed by the date if so desired. In this case we have left it as administrator.zip, the default.

Once this is complete Click .
The files processing progress bar will appear as a modal window. Just be patient because right now the actual compression of all the files and folders in the root directory of the website is taking place. After appropriate processing time, a short time for a small site and a larger time for larger site, processing will stop and the file administrator.zip will be seen in the root folder of the website.

Download this file to the local computer where a local copy of the website is being maintained for safety and backup purposes.

MILESTONE ONE:A backup of all the files and folders of the website is complete.

Next the database underlay of the Joomla website needs to be backed up and restored locally to complete the download and back up operation.

To do this exit from the File Manager section of cPanel and return to cPanel Home. To do so simply close the Browser tab in which the File Manager utility opened and return to the Browser tab when cPanel is still running and displayed.

Scroll part way down and locate the Databases section of cPanel as shown in Diagram 7.

Diagram 7

Double click the phpMyAdmin icon to invoke the phpMyAdmin tool in a new Browser tab as shown in Diagram7.

The phpMyAdmin GUI opens in another tab in the Browser as shown in Diagram 8.

Diagram 8

In the top, left hand side of the phpMyAdmin tool, locate the name of the database that must be backed up, as shown in Diagram 8. Click on that database name and all the tables within that database will get exposed as shown in Diagram 9.

Diagram 9.

Next click on the tab Export which is at the top as shown in Diagram 9.

The View dump [Schema] of Database page will render in the Browser as shown in Diagram 10.

Diagram 10

In the Save as file text box enter any specific file name or leave this blank to accept the default file name given by the tool, then click .

The Save File dialog box will appear as shown in Diagram 11.

Diagram 11

Click and save the database export file to an appropriate folder on the local hard disk for future use in the database restore process. In our case this was E:/public_html/osv/backup.

MILESTONE TWO: Once this completes the database from the website has been successfully exported to the local computer.
Now there are two files in the folder E:/public_html/osv/backup, they are:

Administrator.zip which is a compressed file of all the files and folders that belong to the website.
opensour_opensour.sql which contains the export of the entire opensour database that held all the relevant data of our Joomla website.