Performing a full backup of your ClickCartPro or EuropaCart installation is a two step process. First you will need to download the filesystem via FTP, then you will need to retrieve the database data. This article outlines how to perform a full backup.

STEP 1: FTP Backup of Filesystem

Create a directory on your local computer called ‘backup’. In that directory, create two sub-directories. One named ‘filesystem’ and one named ‘database’. When finished you will have:

/backup
/backup/filesystem
/backup/database

Next, login to your site via FTP and navigate to a location where you can see the private and public directories for your ClickCartPro or EuropaCart installation. Download both the private and public directories for your software into the /backup/filesystem directory on your local computer. When all the files from both directories have been downloaded, the FTP backup of the filesystem is complete.

STEP 2: Database Backup

There are two ways to do a full database backup.

The first is easy, you can use a tool like PHPMyAdmin [[http:www.phpmyadmin.net http:www.phpmyadmin.net]] to do a backup to a database dump file. Using PHPMyAdmin 2.8.2.4 as an example, to backup the database to a dump file, we follow this procedure:

1. Click ‘Export’ on the home page.

2. On the following page, select the database you’re exporting, and choose ‘SQL’ as the format. Leave everything else as-is.

3. Select the ‘Save as File’ option with no compression and click ‘Go’.

4. Save the file when prompted to the /backup/database directory on your local computer.

The second way is a little more time consuming. Using this method has the advantage of giving you your data in a format that can be easily imported back into the program at any time to restore a single table. You need to use your ClickCartPro or EuropaCart management interface to export the database tables to CSV files to accomplish this. To export your tables as CSV files, we follow this procedure:

1. Login to your ClickCartPro or EuropaCart management interface.

2. Navigate to the System | Database | Raw Database Admin function.

3. For each table listed on that page, click ‘Export’.

4. On the following page, make sure all columns are selected for export and the WHERE clause is blank. The order doesn’t matter – choose anything you like. Click ‘Submit’.

5. You will then be directed to download the export file you created for that table – download that file to the /backup/database directory on your local computer.

6. Repeat for every table listed in the Raw Database Admin function.

To speed this process up a bit, we recommend not downloading all the files as you create them. Instead, after you’re finished, login via FTP to your site and download them to the /backup/database directory on your local computer from the public /downloads directory for your software installation. You can either delete the files from the server after they’re downloaded, or they’ll stay there until the software’s cron tasks clean them up.