How to Set up Automatic Backup with Akeeba

When it comes to backing up your site you can honestly never go overboard. The problem is keeping up with backing up your website. It can be quite time consuming if you manage multiple websites. Ah but relax their is a solution! In one of our previus posts we showed you how to backup and restore your website with Akeeba Backup core. Well if you purchase the Pro version (I would HIGHLY reccomend it!) you can easily set up scheduled backups of your websites. Here are the steps on how to do it.

First of all you do have to have the Akeeba Backup Pro version for these features (believe me it's totally worth it!) Akeeba Backup Pro has quite a few different services that you can back up your website to. There are quite a few options: Send by e-mail, Upload to DropBox, Upload to Box, Upload to remote FTP server. Today were going to look at Box, however, any of the other services are fairly easy to set up as well

First we need to set up a secret key for our automatic backup. To do this you need to go to the Akeeba Backup Control Panel and click on Conponent Parameters. From here go to the Front-end backup tab and type in a Secret Word in the Secret Word field. By setting up a secret key it ensures that only you can command the backup process to begin. You also need to change the "Enable front-end and remote backup" to Yes, otherwise remote backups will not work. You can also see below these settings an e-mail on completion option. If you turn this on it will email you each time the backup process is run.

Second, we need to set up a cron job that will run the backup on a certain time schedule. Go to your web servers c-panel and click on the Cron Jobs icon. Next scroll down to the Add a New Cron Job section, and click on the common settings and set it for a week. Now that we have a frequency set for our backup we need to give it a command. For Akeeba Backup you need to use the command below.

/usr/bin/wget --max-redirect=10000 "http://YOUR WEBSITE/index.php?option=com_akeeba&view=backup&key=YOUR SECRET KEY"

Now that we have the cron job set up we need to set up our data processing engine, or rather, our cloud service that we want to send our backup file to. Let's start with Box.net, select "Upload to Box.net" and then Configure. If you only want to store your backup on Box and have it removed from your server select "Delete archive after processing". Now click on "Authentication - Step 1" and sign into your Box account giving your site permission to post your backups to that account. Then click on "Authentication - Step 2" You should see a message saying you were succesfully authorized. If you want select a specific folder for your backup to be placed in click on the Refresh button next to folders and select the folder name you wish to choose. If the refresh does not bring up a list of folders simply go to the top and hit Save & Close and re-open the configuration.

Now you should be seeing your Akeeba Backup's automated. One less thing to worry about.