Interspire Product Knowledge Base

Yes. Interspire Shopping Cart includes the ability to automatically backup your store as many times per day/week/month/year as required. To enable automatically backups for your store you need to do two things: enable automatic backups from the control panel, and setup a crontab on your web server.

How to enable automatic backups

Follow the steps below to enable automatic backups for your store:

1. Click the Settings link and choose the Store Settings menu option
2. Click the Backup Settings tab
3. Tick the Yes, enable automatic backups checkbox under the Automatic Backups (Crontab Based) section
4. The options for automatic backups will appear
5. Choose a backup method (either local or remote) and tick the boxes next to the parts of your store you want to backup
6. Copy the contents of the Cron Path text box to the clipboard, as we'll need it for the next step
7. Click Save

Now that automatic backups are enabled in the control panel, we need to create a crontab entry on the server. A crontab is a special way to repeatedly run a command (in our case, backing up our store) at a specific time of day/week/month.

How to setup the crontab

Please note: If your web hosting provider doesn't run CPanel or Plesk then you will need to setup the crontab manually. You can either do this yourself or ask your web hosting provider to do it for you.

Most web hosting providers run the CPanel or Plesk hosting control, so we'll learn how to setup a crontab for both of those systems below.

How to setup a crontab in CPanel

Login to your control panel and look for the cronjobs icon There are two 'modes' to set cron jobs in Cpanel – you can choose either the standard or the advanced mode. The standard mode looks like this:



This is a very simple way to add the frequency of the cron without needing to know what the asterisk or the numbers mean. In the command line you then add the Cron Path that you copied to the clipboard earlier. In the top field, you place the email address where the output will be sent – this is usually to alert you of errors etc.

For the advanced mode you will see the following:


In this mode, you simply place the Cron Path that you copied to the clipboard into the Command textbox and then enter your frequency in the corresponding columns – they are clearly labeled so you can see which column are using as well.

How to setup a crontab in Plesk

Login to your Plesk control panel and look for the crontab icon. Crontabs are called 'tasks' in Plesk. In order to create a task click on the add new task icon. All current tasks will be shown in the tasks section for the specific user(in the dropdown).

Click the Add New Task button to create a new crontab entry:



Paste the Crontab Path that you copied to the clipboard earlier into the Command field. You will then need to specify when you want the crontab command to run. For a complete tutorial on how to specify when you want the crontab to run, please see this article.

As a general rule of thumb you should backup your store at most twice a day and at least once a week. This obviously depends on how many orders you receive per day and how many new products you add to your store every day.