How to download a backup of your onion service

Knowledgebase / Customer Portal / How to download a backup of your onion service

How to download a backup of your onion service

OnionLand Hosting backs your service up automatically — twice a week, kept for one week, at no cost. The copies stay inside your onion service, so you download them through the Tor Browser with your File Manager credentials.

Step 1 — Open the Backup tab

Open the Backup tab of your onion service in the Customer Portal

Step 2 — Enable the backup service

The first card shows the status. When it is active the button reads "Disable Backup"; when it is inactive it reads "Enable Backup" — click it. The page reloads with a green "The backup is enabled." and the status line above it reads active. There is no extra cost, and disabling later keeps the archives that already exist until their retention runs out.

The Backup card after enabling: the status reads active and the button has changed to Disable Backup

Step 3 — Wait for the first archive

Enabling starts the first copy immediately — in our test the archive appeared about a minute after the click. Reload until a row shows up; an empty card means the copy is still running.

Step 4 — Download the www directory or the MySQL database

The "Partial Backups" card lists the tarballs: one row per www archive and one per database archive, each with the filename, the time it was created and a "Download" link. Click "Download" next to the copy you need. The link lives inside your onion service, so:

Open the Tor Browser — a normal browser cannot reach the address.
Enter the address of your onion service followed by the file-manager port when prompted, and log in with the File Manager credentials shown on the File Manager tab.
Save the .tar.gz file locally. The www archive contains your web root; the database archive contains a dump of every database in your MySQL instance.

If the card stays empty after a reload, open the History tab — the "backup application" event appears there once the copy has finished, which is the authoritative signal that a retry is unnecessary.