Long before we were hosting websites, ReadyWire specialized in website design. At the time, we were a budding business with just a handful of clients. In need of an accounting system, I picked up QuickBooks and installed it on my desktop. About a month later, my computer suffered a legendary Mac OS I/O harddrive crash. Everything was gone…including my Quickbooks data. It took me months to recover.
Today, I can’t imagine what I would do if I lost our accounting data. I don’t even want to think about it. These days, I can sleep at night knowing that our accounting and billing data is safe and sound. For security reasons, I’d rather not disclose exactly what we’re doing to keep our data backed up, but I would like to provide you with some tips on how to keep your your data safe and sound.
Because ReadyWire customers deal mostly with WHMCS, this tutorial will focus on this software title. Next week, this blog will discuss how to backup ClientExec.
WHMCS
Backing up in WHMCS is extremely simple. It’s almost so simple that I don’t really think you’ll need much help getting a backup system setup. Nonethless, I’ll provide you with step-by-step instructions.
In WHMCS, there are two built in solutions for making the backup process seamless and automated. The first method will daily email your WHMCS database to an email address of your choice. The second backup method will upload your WHMCS backup to a remote FTP server of your choice.
To setup the backups in WHMCS, follow the following steps:
1. Login to your administration area. Go to Configuration->Database Backups.
If you receive a permission error, your login does not have access to the backup area. Contact your WHMCS administrator to help you. If you are the WHMCS administrator, point your mouse to Configuration->Administrator Roles. Click on the edit button administration type that your login belongs to. Toggle the checkbox to enable “Configure database backups.” Click save changes. Repeat step one.
2. To setup the backup system so that a backup file is sent to your email address daily, enter an email address in the “Daily Email Backups.”
3. If you would prefer to have a backup file updated to your FTP space, enter the login information into the “Daily Remote FTP backup.”
In order for the automated backup feature of WHMCS to function properly, you need to ensure that the daily cron job has been setup. For details as to how to setup the cron job, visit the WHMCS wiki.