All You Ever Wanted to Know About WordPress Backups – WPCAST007

You’re probably backing up your website already. But do you know what to do with the backup, and how do you know if it actually works? In this episode, we discuss some of the different backup tools you can use, and the best practices you should be following.

The Changelog

• Doug:
  • Updates to EfficientWP and PodWP websites
• David:
  • Thanks to bftrick for the 5-star review!
  • Thanks Empire Flippers and Taylor Pearson for the great comments!

The Core

• Why make backups? Don’t rely on your host, have redundancy in place.
• Back up both your database and filesystem.
• We recommend making database backups daily and file backups weekly.
• Don’t store your backups on your server. Offsite solutions:
  • Amazon S3: reliable, very cheap (around $0.03/GB/month)
  • Dropbox: also great for personal backups, saved Doug before
  • Google Drive: very inexpensive for large amounts of storage
• Ways to make backups:
  • Manually: MySQL export, FTP download, cPanel backup, etc.
  • Plugin: WordPress Backup to Dropbox, BackWPup, BackupBuddy
  • External services: ManageWP, VaultPress
• Test your backups:
  • Do a “sanity check” on the backup filesize.
  • Download and unzip to make sure the files are not corrupted.
  • Do a test restore on a test database.
  • Make sure you know how to restore.

Tips & Tricks

• Doug
  • BigDump is a utility for importing large MySQL files.
• David
  • Vagrant is a development environment “in a box” (somewhat technical).
  • https://github.com/tierra/wp-vagrant
    • Multiple testing environments for different PHP versions.
  • https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/VVV
    • Mimics production environments more closely.
    • Used by core contributors.