How to Backup a Website to Your Computer©       

 Author: John Wilson, BSIM, A+, Network+, CCNA, MCSA

 Here’s how to make a backup copy of your website on your computer!

Note: My Operating System is Windows XP, Professional

         My Word version is 2002

         FrontPage version is 2002

If your system is different, you may get a few variations from what I describe below.

Don’t forget to backup!

Following up on your design and setup of a website. Your hosting service will almost for sure maintain a backup copy of all websites which they host. These backups that they maintain are updated on a regular basis but not constantly. So if you sent something there and they had a failure and if their latest backup of your website was made before you sent that new page or new change to an existing page. You would have to recreate it if you did not have a backup.

So anytime after you have spent a lot of time creating a webpage, just make sure that you keep a copy of it on your computer. FrontPage can make a backup of your entire web site. 

If you don’t have FrontPage, you can backup using Word

If you don’t yet have FrontPage you can accomplish much the same thing by Word by using File-Open and entering the URL to the page web including its name into the Filename box (for instance: http://dollarware.us/websitedesign.htm ). Then once you have the webpage opened in Word, just choose File – Save As and enter the location on your computer to save the page to. You’ll have to do this individually for each page which will be a little slower than with FrontPage.

Suppose you spend a weekend doing a lot of tasks, some of which involve making some changes to webpages and then didn’t remember exactly which ones were changed and which were not. You want a backup but of which pages?  FrontPage to the rescue, again.

Publish an entire web site … in either direction.

Using FrontPage you can make a copy of an entire web site in either direction. That is, you can copy the site that exists on the webserver at your hosting company to your computer. Or, lets say that you have been working offline, making changes to the copy of your website that resides on your computer. You are done and want to update the site at your hosting company. Start FrontPage, from the menu bar choose File- Open Web then from the Open Web dialog box choose the location and the name of the web that you previously backup up to, click open.

 Then from the menu choose the publish destination. You can browse and see places on your computer and on the internet that you have previously published this web site. Select  the Publish Destination and click the OK button.

Then you get to this screen shot

In the above screen shot you get to see the files of your website on both your computer in the left hand side and on the webserver on the right side.  The Options button in the lower right will give you the choice of publishing only changed pages (saving time) or all pages overwriting the existing files.

Click the Publish button on the right side and it publishes everything at once usually in a few minutes but it depends on the speed of your internet connection.

That’s it you’re done!

By the way, I got notice last week that my web host was changing servers and the new servers had different name servers, requiring that I change the dns (Domain Name Server) information with my Domain Name Registrar and then I had to move all the files from the old server to the new one. I simply did a backup to my computer, waited for the dns information to propagate throughout the internet. Then published back to the internet the same way I would have done before the server move. See FrontPage just went to the URL of each site which the nameservers pointed to the new server and away it went in just a few minutes. It all got handled without a hitch. 

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