Firstly we need to quickly explain what Internet is and where it came from. The Internet is offspring of a military project called Arpanet. Arpanet was designed to provide reliable communication during global nuclear war. A vast network of interconnected computers was set up all over world to allow various branches of US and NATO forces to communicate with each other.

Nuclear war never came (thankfully) and world was left with a massive network of computers all connected together with nothing to do. Colleges and universities started to use these computers for sharing research internationally. From there it grew and spread outside colleges to local homes and businesses. The World Wide Web was born and its father was a guy called Tim Berners Lee.

When you're connected to Internet you're sharing a vast network with hundreds of millions of other users. This shared network provides resources that 15 years ago were never thought possible. Unfortunately when something is shared its open to abuse. On Internet this abuse comes from hackers and virus creators. Their sole intent is to cause chaos and/or harm to your computer system and millions of other computer systems all over world.

How do you combat this? You need an Internet security system. This might sound complicated but your Internet security system will be quite straigtforward being comprised of just 2 - 3 Internet security products. We'll look at each of these products in more detail now:

AntiVirus Software The first and most critical element of your Internet security system is antivirus software. If you don't have up-to-date antivirus software on your PC you're asking for trouble. 300 new viruses appear each month and if you're not constantly protecting your system against this threat your computer will become infected with at least one virus -it's only a matter of time.

You don't need to know a lot about how to use Unix or how to use databases like mySQL. The only real tool you need is a telnet client. Also, you need to know a few commands which I'll show you now. (You could even write commands I'm about to give you on a cheatsheet.)

STEP 1: CONNECT & GET IN THE RIGHT FOLDER

The web host you're trying to back up needs to allow shell access (most do these days).

If you have a Windows computer, download a program called "PuTTY" which you can use to login in your web host's shell. Search for "putty ssh" on Google or get it here: http:/ he.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty.exe

Open up PuTTY and at top type in your hostname (your web site address without http or www, just "yourname.com"). Your web host either uses SSH or telnet, first try logging in using SSH and if it won't connect try it using Telnet. Click "Open" button at bottom to connect.

When it connects you will be asked for your account's username, and after you enter that, it will ask for your password. If these both take, you'll see a command prompt of sorts. What you have to do is browse to document root, depending on your host it's usually a folder like "public_html" or "wwwroot".

If wwwroot or public_html folder has more folders inside of it, in form of yourdomain.com, don't browse into them yet, just stay in folder you're in.

Browsing in Unix command prompt is just like DOS, to view a folder type "dir" or "ls", and to go into a certain folder type "cd foldername". If you messed up you can type "cd .." to move up one level.

STEP 2: BACK-UP THE DATABASE

The first step if you're backing up a site is to dump your mySQL database. To do this obviously you need mySQL username and password you want to back up. If your mySQL username is "myuser" and mySQL password is "mypassword", you'd type:

mysqldump -umyuser -pmypassword -A > dump.sql

mysqldump is program we run to dump database into a file, then we type "-u" followed by username (no spaces) and "-p" followed by password (also no spaces). The uppercase "-A" tells program we want to dump every database this user has access to. It MUST be an uppercase A.

The ">" afterwards says we want to put this program's output into a file (otherwise it would show up on screen) and "dump.sql" is name of file we're going to dump to.

This may take a while depending on size of your database. Be patient. Once you have a command prompt again, it's done.

If you don't have root on your server, it may show databases you don't have access to. What you'll have to do here is "force" mysqldump to keep doing backups even if it gets error messages. The flag for "force" is "-f".

mysqldump -umyuser -pmypassword -Af > dump.sql

STEP 3: BACK-UP YOUR FILES

Now you can put everything into one big file, which you can easily move over to new host in one go, instead of one at a time. Unix doesn't let you create Zip files, but you can create a TAR (Tape Archive) which just rolls a bunch of files together without any sort of compression.

To create your TAR archive, type:

tar -cvf dump.tar *