Your ZenCart eCommerce site consists of server side PHP files that makes your store work and the MySQL database that contains all your product, orders, customers, and settings data. As you get more customers and order and add new products, you need to continue to backup your MySQL database on a regular basis.

To make a full backup of your ZenCart site, you have to backup two things: 1) the PHP files, and 2) the MySQL database.

Full Backups

Some webhosts may have backup utilities that will backup your webhost server including the ZenCart PHP files and the MySQL database.

With Hostmonster for example, you can ...

1. Login to your cpanel
2. Click the "Backups" icon
3. Then click "Generate or Download a Full Backup".
4. And then follow the instructions.

Or you can use the "Backup Wizard" by...

1. Login to your cpanel
2. Click the "Backup Wizard" icon
3. And then you can do a full or partial backup.

The full backup file often is compressed using tar and gzip. For example, if you backup file name has the following file extension such as filename.tar.gz, that mean you have to first un-gzip it and the un-tar it in order to get at its content. I recommend the 7-zip compression utility to preform both un-compression. 7-zip is a free compression utility for Windows.

If your webhost does not have such backup utilities, then you will have to manually backup the PHP files and the MySQL files separately.

Backing up the PHP files

To backup the PHP files, you can use a FTP client such as FileZilla to download all the ZenCart site files and subdirectories to your local disk.

Backing up the MySQL database

To backup the MySQL database that is used by your ZenCart shop, there two methods that you can use.

a) You can install and use the Zencart Backup Plugin. More on how to use it here.

b) You can use phpMyAdmin interface to the MySQL database. Many webhosts will have this interface in the cpanel. If not, you can always download and install phpMyAdmin on your server if you have FTP access.

To learn how to use phpMyAdmin, see here.