Using Backwpup Wordpress Backups

This is old, but probably still useful.

Many of you are looking for a free way to do back ups on WordPress, and even though I’ve got some scripts to back up whole directories and that on my website, it’s really nice to be able to split each WordPress instance or website into its own backup, just in case one goes bad or you need to move it. I’ve been using BackWPup. I think that’s how they pronounce it, but it’s WordPress back up plug-in for a year or so now, and it’s only gotten better. You can look for it. Just type in BackWPup. I’m not going to teach you how to add plug-ins or activate them or anything like that, so that’s the name of it. You’ll notice on the dashboard, you have a way to set up your options.

You can go ahead and read on this, but I’m going to show you the basic thing you want to do is go to Jobs, and you see I have one called Nightly 2S3. You can back up to many places, Amazon, local file, I believe Dropbox, all kinds. What you want to basically do is go to Add New Job, we can name this, let’s just call it Another S3 Backup. It doesn’t really matter what the name is. It’s just for you. I back up the database and the file backup. I don’t generally do WordPress XML export because I’ve already got that in the database and I also tend to not do the installed plug-in since I don’t really care. I have other ways to check the database tables, but if you want to, that’s fine. You can go ahead and do that.

For the archive name, you can add in, instead of just Backup WPW, ti da da da da, whatever this whole basically the name, you can also put in the website if you want, just by what it’s for if you have more than one. Generally, each Amazon S3 instance, I have a backup folder for each website, so I don’t have to worry about it. I generally do TARB.zip, most Linux and hosting will have that, but you can leave it as TARG.zip. It’s a slightly bigger file but not a big deal. Here’s what you can do, you can back up to this folder on your host. You can back up by email, FTP if you want, Dropbox, S3. If you have Rackspace cloud files or Microsoft Azure or SugarSync, you can also back up to there, but we’re just going to do S3 and this gives you the email to tell you when it’s done. If you want, and it tells you email from and they don’t give you who all this is from, and send email would log only when errors occur. 99.9% of the time, I get nothing.

We go ahead and save that, then we can go to Schedule. I generally use WordPress prong. It’s a lot easier. For some reason, your WordPress site doesn’t get very much activity. Even if I want to just set up a crime job, which I believe there is plenty of material on, and I’m pretty sure I wrote one as well. If you see a link up here, that means I went in after the fact and added it to a little video tutorial on that. I basically do basic. I just do everyday whatever topic along. Let’s call it, this is a 24-hour clock, so let’s say every night at 11 o’clock. That’s it. Every night at 11, it’s going to go, and this is the important part. When you go to DB Backup, generally you don’t want comments and that kind of things, make sure like redirection, I have a lot.

You want your items. You probably don’t want the logs, sorry I should have left the 404 in the group. You don’t want most things that say Logs because they get big and you’re just backing up redundant data and it’s not going to hurt anything, taxonomies, whatever. You can look through and find. Generally, if it says logs, you don’t want to back it up. You can call it whatever you want and I generally don’t do any database backup compression because it’s going to all get zipped up anyway in our previous screen, so we’ll save that. We go to files, and generally, you probably want to exclude Inclusion WPAdmin because you can just upload a new version of WordPress and it’s got those in. If you want it really quick, like all I have to do is unzip everything and it’s ready to go, no problem.

Here’s another, if you want to be able to do this really quickly, you can keep WP Inclusion, WPAdmin. That way, you can just unzip the whole thing. It’s a little bit quicker, although it does use a little more space. All right, I always exclude my cache if you’re using a caching plug-in upgrade. Uploads I never delete, because that’s where generally your pictures and that kind of stuff are. Backed up logs, I don’t care about because I don’t care what happened three weeks ago if I have a major system problem. I also, in general, I’ll keep all these plug-ins because they’re not that big, but you can exclude them, because again, you can just download them. It depends how much downtime you can afford as opposed to space.

Here’s my themes. I never exclude those because I don’t want to have to recreate that, and that’s usually not something other than 2014 that comes with WordPress. Uploads folder, I back up. PowerPress, I don’t really use this on my S3, but if you want, you can download that, and a nice thing about this is you can also download any extra folders. If you have some static HTML or a lead page, you can actually put that in there. In this case, I don’t have any so it doesn’t matter. Most of you probably won’t. I think most of this stuff is the same, so you have to change it, and the important part here is to S3 service, so we’re going to go pick which one that you’re at, which one you use. You can also use dream host, Google storage if you want, which area, I generally use standard because it’s the cheapest. You’re putting your access key and your secret key and if you click the link that should be on the screen now, you can get another demonstration video on how to set that up now that Amazon’s changed their way to access those a bit.

Once you throw that in, this bucket selection is going to show up and you can pick one if you already have it, or if you want, you can create a new bucket. Let’s say this is a brand-new site, we can type My New Site, and it would come up with that. Of course, without the access keys, it doesn’t matter. We can also do a folder. We can just call it Backups. That’s what I usually do. Here’s the nice thing. You can delete files after an x number of days. I generally do about 30 days because I’d rather have a month in case something comes up. You can do what you want. It will delete the 31st one, so you don’t have to worry about it adding 5,000 files, which a lot of the other plug-ins just keep adding, so automatic deletion. Multi-part upload, the same because who cares? I never use reduce redundancy. If it’s some very critical site for you, you might want to do that, and if you’re worried about people stealing your stuff, you can also encrypt it on the server, which I don’t bother with.

I will not save that because it won’t work. Let’s go look at one of my other jobs, my regular nightly jobs, so let’s edit that, and if we go to the S3, of course this will be blacked out, but here’s my access key, and you can see with the bucket selection, all the different buckets I have, I don’t want to talk too much about Amazon S3, but buckets are basically, think of them as folders and I put it into the backup. That says 15 on this one, no storage, so that should be enough to get you going.

Let’s go to the dashboard, and you can see here how to restore backups. Let’s say, you want to move a website real quick. You can just download this database. It will download the whole thing to your drive. You don’t have to wait for your once a night. Say Bluehost is down again for the 55,000th time this month, and you finally decided to get a real hosting company, you can just do a quick download and put that on your new one. That’s a really nice thing.

It gives you the last log that tells me everything was okay, tells me that the next job’s scheduled for April 17th, and another S3 backup which was never done, so you can see that that’s there, I’ll have to delete it or I’ll have to wear her out. We can also go to job and say, “Hey you know what, I want to run this right now. Let’s run it, then you can see it’s saying backs up. It’s job’s done. There’s not much in this site, and you can also display the log. That should get you going. That’s about all you need for WordPress, which I know most people are using so I will just leave that. If you have any questions, feel free to leave comments or to contact me.