Backing up and restoring your site.

Every Rivervo plan includes daily off-site backups. You also have manual options for "before risky changes" snapshots. Here's the full toolkit.

Layer 1 — automatic daily backups

Every account is backed up to a separate datacenter every 24 hours. Backups are kept for 30 days.

To restore:

1. Panel → Backups → [domain]
2. Pick a date from the calendar
3. Choose what to restore:
   • Full account (files + databases + email + DNS)
   • Just files (specific paths)
   • Just databases (single DB or all)
4. Click Restore

A full restore takes 5‑15 minutes depending on account size. Files-only is usually under 2 minutes.

Restore is non-destructive. If you restore yesterday's database over today's, today's data is overwritten — but a fresh backup of "today" exists in the system before the restore, so you can roll back the rollback.

Layer 2 — manual snapshots in cPanel

Before risky changes (plugin updates, theme changes, server migrations), take a manual backup.

cPanel → Backup Wizard → Backup → Full Backup.

This generates a tarball (backup-MM-DD-YYYY_USERNAME.tar.gz) emailed to you when complete. Includes everything — files, databases, email, DNS zones.

Storage is on the same account, so don't rely on these as DR — they go away if your account does. Use them for short-term "rollback in case I broke something."

Layer 3 — file-only and database-only backups

Files only: Backup Wizard → Home Directory download. Get just your files.

Database only: Backup Wizard → MySQL Database → click DB name. Or via phpMyAdmin → Export.

Smaller, faster, easier to restore individually.

Off-site backups (recommended for production)

Rivervo backups are geographically separate from your hosting, but if you want another offsite copy outside our infrastructure (true DR):

• UpdraftPlus plugin for WordPress — schedules daily backup to S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.
• Cron + rclone for non-WordPress sites — rclone sync your public_html/ to any remote.
• Custom mysqldump cron + scp to another server.

We don't object — your data, your business. Many customers run weekly off-site as belt-and-suspenders.

How to restore from a manual backup

1. cPanel → Backup Wizard → Restore
2. Pick the type (Full / Home Dir / Database / Email Forwarders)
3. Upload the .tar.gz file
4. Restore proceeds automatically

For database restores, you can also use phpMyAdmin → Import → upload the SQL file directly. This way is faster for large DBs.

Common gotchas

"Restored old DB but the site shows new content." Cache. Flush page cache plugin (LSCache, WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache) and OPcache. Restart browser.

"Restored files but site is broken." Permissions. After restore from a backup made elsewhere, run find /home/user/public_html -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \; and find /home/user/public_html -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \; (via SSH or contact us).

"Backup is too big to download via browser." Use FTP/SFTP — connect, navigate to home dir, download the .tar.gz directly. Or split via SSH:

split -b 500M backup.tar.gz backup.tar.gz.part-

Download each part, recombine locally:

cat backup.tar.gz.part-* > backup.tar.gz

Backup retention beyond 30 days

If you need backups older than 30 days (regulatory, legal, etc.), set up Layer 3 off-site backups with longer retention. Our automatic 30 days is for operational restore — not legal compliance archive.

Open a ticket if you have specific compliance requirements; we can quote a managed long-retention service.