Website Tonight Backups

In a company meeting our founder and CEO once said, “Having a backup of your website is like wearing a seatbelt when you drive. It might not seem important now, but when things crash it suddenly becomes crucial.” If your website is important to you then having a backup should be equally as important. Luckily a backup feature is built into Website Tonight.

1. Login to Website Tonight.
2. Make sure the Site tab is selected in the upper left hand corner.
3. Hover over Manage in the upper left hand corner.
4. Select Backup/Restore from the dropdown menu.
5. Create a name for your backup. **
6. Click the Save Web Site button.

Usually backups will only take a couple of minutes. How long your backup takes will depend on the size of your site, how often you backup (fewer changes = faster backup), the speed of your internet connection, whether or not this is your first backup (first backup often takes longer), and how many other users are backing up their websites at that moment.

Now that your backup has been created you should see the name, a time stamp, and a restore option. You can restore it whenever you would like by clicking the up arrow button to the right of the backup’s name. It looks like this:  

** We recommend being descriptive when creating a name for your backup. If you have four backups it’s harder to tell which version is which if you titled them something like; “backup1, backup2, backup3, backup4”. It’s a much better idea to give them names like “before-color-changes” or “adding-links”.

TRICK: Once you have your site built exactly how you want it make a backup. Then change the color scheme, replace images, and backup the website again. Now you have two versions of the same website that you can restore at a moment’s notice. This works great for holiday themes. For example, you can change all the colors on the site to shades of green and put in images of leprechauns and four leaf clovers, then create a backup titled “st-patricks-day”. In March you can switch to the St. Patrick’s Day theme and switch right back after the holiday. Just be sure to make a backup of your Website Tonight BEFORE you start making changes to your current template.

NOTE: If you cancel Website Tonight or let it expire then the backup will be lost also. The backup feature is only intended to allow you to make changes to your site without having to worry that you won’t be able to undo them.