Frequent WordPress backups are a must; they are your safety net. Whether you are blogging for fun or profit, it puts your mind to rest knowing that you can restore your WordPress blog or website within minutes in case something goes wrong.
Automate your WordPress backups
In a previous WordPress tutorial we have seen how to make a manual WordPress backup, but since our brains are not that sharp and typically we forget to make a frequent manual WordPress backups, we use itheme’s premium WordPress plugin BackupBuddy to automate theWordPress backup process.
Why BackupBuddy for WordPress Backups?
Maintaining WordPress can be time consuming and you are better off spending your time generating content for your website or promoting your service rather than making a frequent manual WordPress backup.
There are several WordPress plugins to choose from to automate your WordPress backup. We chose BackupBuddy because of all the features and it is easy to us as we will see in this article. BackupBuddy is developed by iThemes, one of the most experienced companies in developing WordPress software, such as Builder WordPress themes framework.
Complete WordPress backup solution
BackupBuddy backs up all of your WordPress including the WordPress core files, plugins, themes, the WordPress database and any other type of WordPress customization you might have implemented.
Safe and Secure WordPress backup storage
WordPress backups should never be stored on the same WordPress server but on a different safe and secure location. If something goes wrong with the web server where WordPress is hosted, you cannot access your WordPress backups and restore your WordPress blog or website. If you keep your WordPress backups on the same server, there is also a probability that hackers might guess the filenames and location of the WordPress backups and download them. If hackers get their hands on your WordPress backup, they have all the data they need to gain full access to your WordPress and can easily infect it with malware.
BackupBuddy can be configured to backup your WordPress to remote secure locations, such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, Email, FTP and Rackspace cloud.
WP White Security.com Security Tip: Remember to tick the option “Delete local backup file after remote send success” from the BackupBuddy Scheduling options to ensure no WordPress backups are stored on your WordPress server.
Schedule a convenient time for your WordPress backup
BackupBuddy can be configured to backup your WordPress anytime you want; you can configure both the backup interval and the backup time. The backup interval options are hourly, daily, weekly, twice monthly and monthly. You can also configure the time when the backup starts. If your website is typically busy in the late afternoon till midnight, you can configure BackupBuddy to start the WordPress backup early morning.
As seen in the above screenshot, from the scheduling options you can also configure BackupBuddy to make a WordPress database backup or a full WordPress backup. With these options you can configure specific WordPress backups to be space and bandwidth efficient as seen in the next point.
Space and bandwidth efficient WordPress backup
From the scheduling options in BackupBuddy you can configure the backup plugin to make a full WordPress backup or just a WordPress database backup. If you are not familiar with these options, or why and how they are used we will explain how to use them to configure space and bandwidth efficient WordPress backups.
WordPress backup basics
WordPress is a MySQL database driven php web application. For a complete WordPress backup you must backup;
- The files from your webspace which contain the WordPress web application files, WordPress theme/s files, plugins files and your uploaded content.
- The WordPress MySQL database where the content of blog posts and pages, user information, passwords and privileges, website settings, theme settings, WordPress plugins settings etc are stored.
Configuring WordPress backups to save space and bandwidth
Bloggers and WordPress webmasters frequently publish blog posts and WordPress pages, but they do not change their WordPress theme every week, or install plugins and implement WordPress customization. Such WordPress changes only happen once in a while.
Therefore from the above information we can determine that the WordPress database is frequently changing while the WordPress files are not. Some files will be added if you upload images or other content in your blog posts and pages. To save space and bandwidth you can configure two types of backups in BackupBuddy.
- Daily WordPress database backup
- Weekly or Monthly full wordpress backup
By scheduling such backups in BackupBuddy, the WordPress files are not transferred to the remote backup location each time, thus saving bandwidth and drive space.
Restore or Migrate WordPress with a few mouse clicks
Bloggers, webmasters and everyone can tell you that trying to restore or migrate a website can be a cumbersome experience. But not if you use BackupBuddy for your WordPress backups. To restore or migrate a WordPress blog or website you can simply:
- Download the importbuddy.php tool.
- Upload importbuddy.php & backup ZIP file to the destination site.
- Navigate to the uploaded importbuddy.php URL in your web browser.
- Follow the on-screen directions until the restore / migration is complete.
As you can see there is no need to get your hands dirty and tweak scripts to restore or migrate a website with BackupBuddy.
Fully configurable WordPress backup plugin
Apart from all of the above functionality features, BackupBuddy has a number of other features that make it a complete WordPress backup solution. Other features highlights are:
- Restrict access to BackupBuddy configuration to fellow bloggers
- Exclude directories and database tables from the backup
- Configure backup status notification emails
- Configure backup files and size retention
- And much more…
Automatic WordPress backups for peace of mind and efficiency
For the smooth running of every WordPress blog and website use BackupBuddy to implement an automatic WordPress backup solution. As we have frequently seen WordPress backups saved the day when a website or blog got hacked and infected with malware. And there is no better option than BackupBuddy for automatic WordPress backups since it was designed to be easy to use and supports storing of WordPress backup in remote locations for secure WordPress backup storage.
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