How SynaptikCMS Handles Backups (And Why It Matters More on Shared Hosting)
Most CMS platforms treat backups as an afterthought — a plugin you install later, or a task you hand off to your hosting provider and hope for the best. On shared hosting, that hope is often misplaced: many hosts only keep a rolling few days of snapshots, and restoring a database-driven site usually means restoring the database and the files in sync, or risking a broken site.
SynaptikCMS sidesteps half of that problem by design — there's no database to keep in sync in the first place. But content still needs protecting, and that's what the built-in backup tool is for.
What gets backed up
A backup is a single ZIP archive containing:
/data/— every article, page, project, category and tag, as individual JSON files/files/— all uploaded mediasettings.json— site configuration
Core CMS files, themes, and plugins are intentionally excluded. They're static code that lives in version control or a release ZIP — backing them up alongside your content would just bloat the archive with files that never change between backups.
Restoring is a single action
Because there's no database, restoring doesn't involve running SQL imports or worrying about schema mismatches between backup and live versions. The restore tool extracts the ZIP back into place — and before it does, it automatically creates a fresh safety snapshot of the current state first. If a restore goes wrong, or you picked the wrong backup by mistake, you haven't lost anything: the pre-restore snapshot is sitting right there in the same backups table.
Why this matters more on shared hosting specifically
Shared hosting environments are usually the least forgiving when something breaks — no shell access to fix a corrupted table, no staging environment, sometimes no easy way to even see what changed. A flat-file backup sidesteps most of that: it's a folder of JSON files and images, human-readable, and restorable without any server-side tooling beyond unzip.
It also makes moving between environments — say, from a local MAMP setup to production — a matter of exporting a ZIP and importing it, rather than exporting a database dump and hoping the character encoding survives the trip.
Where to find it
Backups live under Tools → Backup in the admin panel, with a table of past backups (downloadable individually) and a one-click restore per entry. There's no cron job or external service involved — it runs whenever you trigger it, on demand.