All About WordPress Backups

 

There are many ways to back up your WordPress website. One of them is right for you, but not all of them are. I’ll show you some options and help you make a choice.

Transcription:

Hey folks. Welcome to another HeroPress Tip of the Week. This week we’re going to talk about backups, who should do it, when you should do it, why you should do it, how you should do it, etc.. These days, most hosts back up your site for you every night. In the early days, when that was a new thing, it was very common for people to say, “Don’t trust your hosts backups. Do your own,” which at the time made sense, because they weren’t always reliable and you should make your own.

These days, for your normal blog, or just a regular website, I recommend you trust your host. You’ve probably gone to update your plugins or themes or something, and had WordPress say make sure you do a backup before you do this. And thought, “Well, how do I do a backup? What does that look like? What does it mean?” So I’m gonna walk through two scenarios here for you. 

First, let’s take a look at what this host offers. This is SiteGround. I’m gonna go to site tools on one site. This is my own blog. On the left, under security, you’ll find backups. And there are two things going on here. One is every morning around for 4:45, they do a backup for me. Every night. So I know since it’s my blog that I only post about once a month. So I can just go back to any number of these and grab it and it’s going to restore me completely. That’s it.

If you have concerns, and think, Boy, huh, I don’t know if this plugin is gonna melt down my site or not, right here, you can put in a name for this backup, so right before backups on Tuesday or something, and hit “create”, and it will make a backup for you, and it will store it on their server. That’s very important, storing it on their server. We’re going to talk about that a little bit later too. You need your backups stored someplace other than your web server so that if your site melts down, you can come back here and over here on the right, click these three dots, and either restore all files or just the databases or all files and databases, or even emails.

Let me show you another example. This is WPEngine. If I click on my site and go over here to backups, there’s my list of backups that happen every night. There’s go just before midnight, it would appear. And you can either restore or prepare a zip, which means it’ll give you a zip file of these days. And you can optionally manually create a backup, give it a name, put in an email address, and they’ll email you when it’s ready. 

So the way I do plugins, I don’t actually bother running my own backups before I just hit update because they’re here for me. Now, that’s only with my personal stuff. If I’m doing a client site or something like that, I go ahead and I run a backup in here, a manual one right before it updates, just in case. 

But when should you not trust your host’s backup? When should you do your own? And how should you do them? Well, what I’m going to suggest is when your website is particularly important. If it’s running a store that employs you or pays for the living of a bunch of employees, it’s really important to have that backed up and checked. Checking is very key. An unchecked backup is a hope. And hope is not a strategy. So you need to be checking your backups every now and again. Once a week, you just download it, you peek inside, Yep, all my stuff is there, and way you go. It doesn’t take very long, but that’s how it works. 

So how should this be done? Well often was a plugin. This is BackupBuddy. It’s been around a really long time. It’s on iThemes, which is owned by Liquidweb and StellarWP. Something great about it is it can do incremental recovery. So you can dip inside of a backup and recover one file that you deleted by accident without having to bring back your whole website and wipe out some potentially new stuff.

It costs about 200 bucks a year. And one of the great things is that it comes with starsh storage space which means your backups are not on your site. There are a number of backup plugins on wordpress.org and they weren’t great. They backup your site, they store right there with your site. So if your site gets wiped out, your backups get wiped out with it. That’s why you should save your stuff someplace else. So BackupBuddy has been around a really long time. It’s a pretty good plugin. 

Next, we have Updraft Plus. You can get a free version, which stores it right on your web server or you can get premium and it will store it someplace else. Now, the free version will let you store it someplace other than your own service. If you want to set up FTP or email a large file somewhere or something like that. I recommend you get the service. 70 bucks a year for personal. Over here you can see their higher prices for larger sites. But it’s worth it. If your site is really valuable, 70 bucks a year is not going to break your bank. 

Another one we’re going to look at here is VaultPress from Jetpack, which is made by the wordpress.com people. They have a package of five bucks a month. There’s is pricing here. So there’s two. This one is 10 bucks a month but there’s 25 bucks a month plan as well that gives you a lot more stuff. Just like everything. I could go on and on and on. There’s so many plugins that do backups, and most of them are good. Find one you like that has the right price. 

And my recommendation is if you’re just running a blog and nobody’s life depends on it, just trust your site, your host backup. They’re good. They work well. They have good “restore” processes. Like if you were to click this one and hit restore, their engineers set it up to restore perfectly. They know how to do it. It’s not like you’d have to do something and download files and make sure everything’s right. I mean, you should check but they know what they’re doing. Trust your host. Almost every host has them because it is relatively easy and inexpensive to do and have a high value to the customer, which is you. So to be able to say, you know, we offer backups, is great business sense for them. 

So to start back from the beginning, you’re site owner, you’re gonna update plugins that it says make sure you backup first. If you’ve never done it before, check with your host, find out do they do backups. If you have done it before and you know your site’s being backed up every night and maybe you did a manual just before, just go ahead and hit the button. It’ll be fine. I hope you found this useful.