Credits: Video Training produced by Brian Teeman
Transcript of this course
As well as creating manual backups Akeeba Backup offers you the opportunity to automate the process to ensure that you will always have an up to date backup.
Here on the control panel we can see an option called schedule automatic backup.
If we scroll down we can see there is a Frontend Backup feature that is currently not enabled so we need to go back to the Control Panel to enable it.
Select the system configuration at the bottom of the page and then the public api tab.
Here we can enable the Frontend Remote backup and give it a secret word this should be a combination of upper and lower case characters and numbers.
There is another option to enable the site to send you an email once this remote backup has completed.
If I do not enter any details below this email will be sent to all Super Administrators on the web site.
Click Save and close and return to the schedule automatic backups.
I can see that the frontend backup feature is now enabled and there are five different methods available to me to peform this frontend backup.
I am going to use a service called WebCron to automate it.
WebCron is a service run by an external website called webcron.org So let's go to that site.
webcron.org offers several services including uptime monitoring and something called an Online Cron.
A cron is just a computer word for an action that takes place at a specific time and that's what we want to do.
Webcron.org is a commercial service that is exceedingly cheap.
If we check their prices we can see that a cron that lasts about 180 seconds which should be enough to backup most web sites costs a fraction of a cent.
in fact for just 1 Euro you can perform 1000 backups more than enough to do a backup a day for several years.
So go ahead and signup it's free to signup and it includes some free credits so that you can test the service out before committing.
Once you have signed up and created your account go ahead and login.
We are now at the dashboard where we can create our cron.
Select the new cron and give this cron a title.
Then select the timeout and as I suggested 180 seconds is probably enough but we will be able to see later on if we need to increase it.
We now need the specific url that you want to execute.
To find that return to your web site and here under the webcron.org options you will see the url.
Simply select it and copy.
Return to webron.org and paste.
You do not need to enter the login or password.
You now need to set the times and dates that this cron, this backup will take place.
I want it to take place every year, every month, every day of the month, every day of the week, and then I want it to take place sometime in the middle of the night when my web site's not busy.
So I am going to select one ten and then scroll down and submit.
My cron has now been created and I can confirm that by clicking on the cron and here we can see it.
You can now return to your web site.
The web site will now perform backups on a regular basis every single day at in my case 1:10 in the morning.
But remember the backup will still be stored on your web site so it's important to go the Manage Backups and select the backup and download it to your own computer.