In this article I’m going to show you how to restore a partial home directory backup in cPanel. This will allow you to restore your account’s website and email files to a previous date when you last made a website backup.

This is good knowledge to have, so in case you’ve accidentally removed some files from your website, or deleted an important email, you can get those lost files back. It’s also handy to backup website files prior to upgrading software that runs your website, so that if anything goes wrong you can at least revert to the working old version again.

When you restore a partial home directory backup like we’re creating covering below, this is going to overwrite any existing files currently on your account. So if you have a /public_html/index.htm file on your account, and the backup you created also has that file, the file from the backup will be restored over the current live file.

If you have a new file such as /public_html/index2.htm live on your website that didn’t exist in the backup, or you’ve gotten new emails since you made your partial home directory backup, these files will not be overwritten during the restore.

Restore home directory backup in cPanel

Following the steps below you can learn how to restore a partial backup of your website including all the files in your home directory.

  1. Login to your cPanel.
  2. Under the files section, click on Backup.
  3. Click on Choose File.
  4. The name of your backup should now be displayed, so click on Upload.
  5. You should then see the progress of your files being restored.

You should now know how to restore your website files from a partial home directory backup in cPanel that you’ve previously made.

You will also want to read my articles on how to backup your database in cPanel, and restore your database in cPanel to get a better understanding of how cPanel handles restoring the different parts of your website.