Akeeba Back-up is the one tool everyone installs on his Joomla site. The reason is simple: it’s the ultimate back-up tool. And the great thing is that there’s many ways to configure / make your back-ups.
The best, and least time consuming option, is to automate your back-ups. You can use Cron Jobs for this. If you’ve running your own server, this shouldn’t be a problem (check the Akeeba Backup manual if you need help anyway); but when you use shared hosting this is often not an option.
But wait! You can use a 3rd party service, called Webcron.org that allows you to create Cron Jobs. If you check the website, you’ll see that their pricing isn’t just fair – they’re ridiculously cheap (don’t tell them. I quite enjoy my 1,000 Cron Jobs for a mere euro).
Once again, the Akeeba Backup manual does a fine job explaining how to configure the cron job, but just in case: Here’s our manual on how to get started.
We’ll assume that you’ve already installed Akeeba Backup and that signing up for http://www.webcron.org (and adding a few copper coins to your account ) is no roadblock for you.
Go to Component Parameters
- Go to your website and go to Components > Akeeba Backup
- In Akeeba Backup, click “Component Parameters”
Configure the front-end back-up
- Click on the “Front-end Back-up” tab in the window that appears.
- Set “Enable front-end and remote back-up” to “Yes”.
- Enter the Secret Word. This can be anything, but the more complicated the better. 😉
- Optional: Configure Akeeba Back-up to mail you when the back-up is complete (recommended)
Setup the Cron Job in Webcron.org
Log in to Webcron.org, then perform the following steps:
- Click “Dashboard”
- Then, click “New Cron”
Create the Cron job by providing your information:
- Name of the Cron Job. This could be anything
- Timeout: You’ll need to choose the right value for your sites (being, longer than a back-up takes). 600 sec is a safe choice.
- URL: Path in Akeeba’s Manual (Read more here). If you need help creating the URL, visit our sister site: http://toralkodev.com/projects/webcron
- Not needed
To finish, setup the schedule for the Cron job. To finish, click “Submit”.
Webcron will now do it’s thing on the scheduled time. You’ll get an e-mail from Akeeba Backup when the back-up fails or you can read the log for the Cron Job on Webcron.org to see what happened. Of course, checking Akeeba Backup will also give you an idea whether it succeeded or not.
In Akeeba Backup, click “Site Parameters
should read
In Akeeba Backup, click “Component Parameters”
Hostgator has cron jobs so the following worked like a charm:
wget –max-redirect=10000 –output-document=/dev/null
“http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?option=com_akeeba&view=backup&key=YourSecretKey&format=raw”
Thanks for the post
Thanks Jef, the error has been corrected.
I haven’t tried setting up Cron Jobs in Hostgator (Although I have an account there, I don’t use it for live sites) but thank you for your extra info.