Every time I try to download a backup of my site about 3 GB size... it times out at some point. Sometimes it stops at 1GB, sometimes 2. Why does it do this and how do I prevent it?

It behaves as if the download is complete but I am left with a partial backup instead of a full one.

Hello,
if you use FTP for backup downloading you can download up to 2 Gb via it.


Best regards,
Slavik Koshelev

I downloaded via the cPanel. Is there a limit on that too?

If so, how would we download backups of our site?

It sometimes works though... but more than half the time, it finishes prematurely.

Use FTP for big files as Slavik said. Also almost all FTP programs have the ability to resume downloads if something wrong happen in the middle of a download.

If you haven't a ftp program, I recommend you FileZilla as a Windows platform ftp client, because it's free, open source, multilanguage, and works quite well
http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/

I'm using SmartFTP but it's behaving as if the download finished, rather than being cut off or incomplete.