Backing up your WebSite is a necessary step for all users.
This article describes how to recursively download your WebSite with all files, directories and sub-directories from FTP server, using Wget utility.
First of all create a folder in which you are going to download a site. For example, let’s create the folder backups in a home directory.
# mkdir ~/backups # cd ~/backups
Download Entire Site from FTP
The following command recursively downloads your site with all its files and folders from FTP server and saves them to the current directory.
# wget -r -l 0 -nH ftp://user:pass@ftp.server.com
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| user | FTP username |
| pass | FTP password |
| ftp.server.com | IP address or domain name of an FTP server |
| -r, –recursive | Recursive retrieving |
| -l, –level | Maximum recursion depth (0 = unlimit) |
| -nH, –no-host-directories | Disable generation of host-prefixed directories |
Your site has been downloaded:
# ls -l drwxr-xr-x 4 user group 4096 2013-05-09 18:20 yoursite.com
Backup Downloaded Site
Now you can compress the folder with your site as follows:
# tar -czf site-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).tar.gz yoursite.com
The previous command creates an archive, named something like site-backup-20130509-190638.tar.gz.
To extract the archive, type:
# tar -zxvf site-backup-20130509-190638.tar.gz
Download a Particular Folder from FTP
Let’s say we have the following structure in FTP home directory:
/yoursite.com/www/images
The following command recursively downloads ‘images’ folder, with all its content from FTP server and saves it to the current directory.
# wget -r -l 0 -nH -np --cut-dirs=2 ftp://user:pass@ftp.server.com/yoursite.com/www/images
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| -np, –no-parent | Don’t ascend to the parent directory |
| –cut-dirs | Ignore ‘number’ parent directories |
All these tasks have to be automated and added to Cron. The HowTo is coming …