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How to backup your
website with Front Page.
Backing up your website's) is simply good a practice because web hosts do not take responsibility for data being lost for any reason and most do not even do their own internal backup. The first time you do these steps there will be several but after you have done this once there are only 3 mouse clicks to backup and a backup should be made every time your website changes. I backup my own sites everyday because I have my databases included into my root web (more on this later).

Open your website in Front Page (of course!) File --> Open Site -->

Click Open

Enter your username and password!

Click File --> Publish Site (you may have to expand the menu to see the publish site option)

The first time you do this you will have to create a place for your website on your computer, you may even get this screen first:

Do as it says and click "Remote Website Properties" ... if you did not get screen don't worry about it... continue on...

You can use the browse button to place the files somewhere else or just go with what it is suggesting... I prefer to store my backups in a folder called "My Websites" and then I give each site I backup a separate folder by using the browse button... if you give it a path that doesn't exist you will be prompted to create it which is OK.

Again, these screens you will only get the first time you publish your site to your own hard drive.

Now, the confusing screen, really all you have to do here is click "Publish Web Site" but you will notice that it actually seems a little backwards, in this case the "Local" is actually your live website on the server and the "remote" is your computer... it seems a little backwards but look at the top of the screen and it points out what is what. You always want to go "Local to Remote" unless your restoring a your backup to the live website which is not what we are learning here!

If you get this screen:

You have files open, click cancel, save your open files and start process over again.

If this windows pops up

Just click "Ignore and Continue"

The website will then begin to download with a screen like this:

Then finally will show you a report like this:

That's, it you are done, the next time you want to back you website simply click File --> Publish Site and then click on the "Publish Web site" button... the only difference is that sometimes FrontPage will warn you that pages have changed on both the local and remote side in which case you will want to over write the remote side (just make sure that the remote side is in fact your computer by looking at the top:

For making backups of what you see online the local should always be http:/// something...

For those with database keep reading...

I have my database stored in the same place as my website files in a password protected directory so that when I do this publish trick I'm also backing up my data (well, actually just a backup of the data that my SQL server produced the night before.) If you have a database it is most likely not part of your web root and you need to back that up on your own either with FTP or by having your web host produce a copy in your root web as I do. I do this for my own clients on my server so when you do a website backup you are also backing up a copy of your database from the night before (an automated process runs every morning at 3am to make a copy of your database available in your web root) so this process may take longer if you are also downloading the database. You do not have to backup your files every night but be warned however old your backup is is how old your site will be if it has to be restored because of hardware or other failures which are not common but do happen.