I want to take you through a review of a plugin I highly recommend called backwpup. This is a plugin which takes regular scheduled backups of your site.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backwpup/
I used to go on about the benefits of backupbuddy but I’ve gone off that plugin because I’ve seen it failing to take backups 0n a number of sites due to size, timeouts and other php issues. This is not something you can have working some of the time an not others when you are talking about backups so I went looking for an alternative.
Backwpup also has the added bonus that it is free, the other quality backup plugins and services are usually premium.
You Are Taking Backups Aren’t You?
It still amazes me to see the number of sites that are not taking backups in the mistaken understanding that their hosting company is doing it for them. This is not always the case you should always take a backup.
Install a backup plugin now and starting taking your own backups on a regular basis.
File And Database Backups
It is very important to remember that WordPress is made up of two components the database which contains all your data and variable settings and the file base which contains your WordPress scripts, themes, plugins and any uploaded media such as images, videos, pdf etc.
Many plugins backup the database, but only a few do both, backwpup is one of those.
Scheduled Jobs
The plugin allows you to schedule backup jobs which run automatically, if you are anything like me, you will forget to run backups and right when you need an archive you wont have one.
I recommend have a backup routine of daily database backups and weekly full backups of database and file base. BackWPup allows you to do this.
Offsite backups
Another great facility is the ability to push your archive files off your site. This means you have an offsite copy of your data in case anything catastrophic happens to your hosting account.
With an offsite backup you can always rebuild your site.
BackWPup allows you to push your archive to an ftp site, amazon s3, your drop box account and a number of other services.
Alerting
The system has email alerts if anything goes wrong, please please check your backups, during my days in corporate IT I can remember three or four times when I came to do restores only to find the archives had failed and we were not aware of that.
The alerting email systems tells you about completed backups but also reports on an issues found during the backup.
Restoration
Backwpup comes with a restoration script, fingers crossed I’ve not had to restore a backup yet, and I haven’t use this script so I cannot comment on how good it is.
The documentation suggests it will take the database files and restore them automatically for you. It’s very important to know how to recover in the event of a failure.
Wrap Up
If you don’t have a backup schedule in place or you only have a partial backup I recommend you download and install BackWPup. I’m using it on all my sites now, and with my clients too.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backwpup/
Photo Credit: Daniel Leininger via Compfight cc