A good rule of thumb to follow while you are configuring your back-up is to figure in how often you plan to update your site, or if you plan on having customers or visitors enter their information into an area of your site. You can then use this figure to decide how often your back-ups should be performed.

Once you have configured your back-ups, you will not need to worry about them. They will automatically run at the specified time each day, or each week. The output of the file will normally be saved in the home directory of your site.

Now, let’s say that you installed a new application on your website and it completely destroyed all of your site’s data. This is a little extreme, but it has happened in the past to thousands of webmasters. Don’t panic! You can easily restore your back-up from your dedicated server’s control panel.

Assuming you have followed the instructions above, you should have at least the past week’s data saved in the home directory of your server. This file will normally be zipped or compressed in some way. You can now log-in to your dedicated server’s control panel, and begin the restoral process.