How to Perform a Full Backup of Interspire Email Marketer

There are various occasions when you should perform a full backup of your install of Interspire Email Marketer. I encourage clients to run and perform a full backup under the following circumstances:

• At least every 6 months (more often depending on your level of use and activity
• Before you install a new addon
• Before you update or upgrade an addon
• Before you update Interspire Email Marketer to a new version

Like any other PHP application Interspire Email Marketer has data and components that allow it to run in two places. The files in the server directory, and the information stored in the tables of the database. You will want to backup both.

Traditionally the easiest way to backup the files is to download the files via FTP. Use a FTP client program like Filezilla and download everything to your local hard drive. I generally zip this folder to save space and then store it on a separate hard drive and server for backup.

To download the tables in the database you can login via PHPMyAdmin (available via CPanel) and do an export via PHPMyAdmin. You should be able to get this information by contacting your web hosting provider and either asking them to provide you with a database tool, or for them to provide you with the backup file. This will download a SQL file that you can also zip or add to the same zip that contains the files.

If you have a working knowledge of using SSH you can also do a SQL dump via SSH. The  command for the SQL dump is:

mysqldump -u databaseuser -p databasename > nameoffile.sql

This will create the SQL backup file and store it on the root of the server.