How to make a full backup

So…

Over the last few weeks I’ve experienced a “The MySQL server is currently offline”. error message, on and off.

It would happen periodically, and then it would work fine again. (The downtime was usually around 5 minutes or so).

During downtime, in Cpanel, I tried to access myphpadmin and got an “error establishing database” error message.

I emailed my host about this… And never heard back.

A few hours later, I visit my URL and there’s some crazy “Install WordPress Screen”. WTF?!?!

It seems like my wordpress install was completely deleted.

That wasn’t the case…

But the MySql databases were like corrupted. They were much smaller than they were.

So… My question…

Is how do I make a COMPLETE backup of my wordpress installation.

Do I ONLY need a copy of my mysql database, and the file structure?

How do I back it up fully and securely?

I’ll worry about how my MySql got deleted later.

For now I just need to ensure it’s backed up fully.

Thanks for any help.