need help from someone who knows about Wordpress, Cpanel, and backups

Not sure, but is your database still intact?

 

I always ran the development from my computer and ftp the stuff over to the server. There you can use cpanel and wordpress to put your site up under your control. If it was on a database make sure that you have the backup of all of the text. Then if the site goes down, you can restore it. So getting your backups, start building a directory with the text and images that you recover. I always used PHP to run a site application and tested it on my own system using the wamp stack before deploying it.

 

I must agree with Dana. Best to develop offline, test on your own private machine, and FTP it in. The CPanel backups are good to download regularly, though, as they will have your entire space backed up, such as any email accounts they have on the host and your site, so if something happens to the host, you can upload the backup to a new hosting provider that also uses CPanel. I actually had to do this several years ago for my parents' company hosting. We started with a hosting provider out of Washington. Had a great deal. For the first 6 months, everything went great. Then we started having little issues here and there with the server crashing. Then, everything went down, and their number was reporting as disconnected. I was actually out of town on a temporary job, and used the hotel's internet to find a new hosting provider (who we still use for email, we have a seperate provider for the website, it's a custom hosted thing for that industry), walked my parents thru setting up the account, got the login details, remoted in to my home machine, recreated the email accounts, and uploaded the backup. Luckily, we used a 3rd party DNS provider, so we didn't loose the domain name. After all this was done, we only lost about 3 days of email, and the website was also down for the same timeframe. We had this same type of problem when we were initially going to migrate all our web services to the company that hosts our website now, actually migrated everything, and their email services kept crashing because it didn't properly support IMAP, and they were limiting the inbox sizes too much for us (250MB is nothing for an inbox these days, we've got some that with all the archives in them were at 2GB at the time). Went back to the DNS provider, changed the MX records back, and our email was back up. Added a new record creating a subdomain at the hosting provider redirecting all incoming emails on that subdomain to the main domain, and at the web hosting provider, added a filter that all incoming mail for unspecified accounts redirects to the subdomain. We only have 2 machines checking the mail accounts on the web hosting provider, because their software directly places the mail in the inboxes. Those two machines move everything to the IMAP folders on the email host. We still keep the web site somewhat up to date on the old host, so if we need to, we can quickly change the DNS entry, and have it up.