Backing up and restoring a website without ftp or sftp access

[Sysman]

New job, crap pay (it's startup territory), but it gets us out of the house.

Bad news first. Crappy XP system at work, not much security, no ftp, ssh or sftp access to the outside world, and at the moment not enough privs to install the likes of PuTTY

The good news is that we have a free rein to do whatever we want, as long as we start off cheap. Plan B's are encouraged here as long as we produce something useful for ClientCo along the way.

I've already set up a web site (on my own ISP host) for us to use, but we are surely going to make cockups on the way so I'm after an idea for backing up and restoring the website via clickable links. Due to security concerns there is no way I am going to use my ISP master username and password on a work system.

P.S. I've also got a learning curve to tackle with Office 2007. I now understand comments I've read here about corporates being reluctant to adopt it. Has anyone got some links to online tutorials?

[PAH]

I've already set up a web site (on my own ISP host) for us to use, but we are surely going to make cockups on the way so I'm after an idea for backing up and restoring the website via clickable links. Due to security concerns there is no way I am going to use my ISP master username and password on a work system.

Doesn't your ISP offer a control panel for remotely administering hosted sites over HTTP?

The control panels typically provided should offer an easy way of creating backups and even secondary user accounts without the full privileges.

[AtW]

If it's a CPanel based site then there should be backup/restore in it.

Often it is possible to use https to access Cpanel, just use port 2083 to access it.

[Sysman]

No, it's not CPanel

Thanks for the answers, but I really don't want to store my account details on the XP system at work. Access to a directory which is only readable from the outside world would be ideal.

I am thinking a bit of password protected PHP or CGI should do the trick. I might also do a regular sweep from my home system to pick up any backups available, but I'm not going to give anyone access to that.

[Ardesco]

If you don't have SFTP/FTP access how do you upload stuff? Surely the mechanism used to upload data can be used to download data as well...

[RichardCranium]

Why not just register a new domain on a host that uses cPanel and use that instead of using your own?

[NickFitz]

Set up a Subversion repository accessible over HTTP. (You were planning on using version control, weren't you? Hint: do so.)

Then it should be a reasonably straightforward matter to set up a script in PHP or similar which can update and rollback as desired using either a Subversion client installed on the server or a slightly more laborious procedure using cURL to scrape the results from the HTTP connection to the repository and retrieve the appropriate resources.

[Sysman]

I do have a control panel available over https. The problem is that I don't really want to store php files containing passwords on the works PC.

Thanks Nick. You are correct in divining that I really ought to have a version control system.

Updated: Fortunately Subversion is already on the host, so we're set to go