Can you correct me on this please, I'm a newbie to all this. When you buy a hosting package you normally get the php mysql cPanel setup with the package but in my case my hosting company didnt provide that service so I had to set my own php mysql and upload it to my server via FTP. I normally backup my website via FTP to my computers hardrive - correct What about my php mysql database which is also on my server now, do I backup this via FTP to my computer? or do I need a separate folder for php mysql on my local hardrive or can I backup the website files and the database files together in one folder to my local hardrive. So for a whole year i have been doing backups of my site via FTP but there was NO php mysql database. If I wasent doing the database backups, who was?. I must sound thick to you but Im a newbie to all this.
you have to take the database backup using DB backup command or DB gui utility, Then Install the DB on new server and Restore the database on it.
You can use mysqlhostcopy to dump your database to another folder which can then be downloaded via FTP or you can use mysqldump to dump databases to a folder and again download vai FTP. Normally you schedule one of those commands to run via cron while the server is quiet. For PHP just download your site files via FTP, from the backup point of view there's no difference between PHP and HTML. You also have the option of seeing if your datacentre offers R1Soft or something like that, this can be configured to backup everything for you. To answer that question the hosting provider should be doing backups for you, though there's no guarantee. We for example use R1Soft to backup files and databases every hour for our hosting clients.