If your hosting company has backup and restore services, you can always use that. The following article suggests a 'do-it-yourself' backup procedure.
* Backing up files
Backup your files by simply downloading them to your computer by FTP.
* Backing the database
If your hosting company has PhpMyAdmin, then you can use it to export the entire database into a file and download to your computer. See the 'Export' tab in PhpMyAdmin.
* Restoring your database
There are two ways of restoring a database.
1. PhpMyAdmin:
You can use PhpMyAdmin's 'SQL Query' feature to import your SQL file.
2. Form the command line (advanced):
Sometimes, SQL files are too big to import via the PhpMyAdmin, so you will need to import your SQL file from the command line.
1. Upload the sql file to your account
2. SSH or Telnet to your account
3. Change directory to where you uploaded the sql file
4. Type in the following command:
mysql -u xxx -p yyy -D zzzz < backup.sql
Where xxx is the MySQL username, yyy is the password, zzz is the database name. backup.sql is the name of your file.