Introduction
If you work with the Internet, you know that this wonderful world is full of dangerous things. We all know that one of the best practices when using a computer is to have a regular backup plan. Yet, we don’t always use this logic when it comes to our websites, and this is a big mistake!
For example, you could fall victim to a malicious hacker, or your WordPress website could break down due to the installation of a faulty plugin, add-on or theme.
So what exactly is a back-up? It is a copy of your website that you can easily restore whenever you need. On WordPress, creating a back up is made easy, because these guys know more than anyone how important back-ups really are! So, in order to create your WordPress backup you first need to understand that a WordPress website is made up of two “logical parts”.
- Theme, plugins, scripts, media and anything else making up the structure of the website, and its functionalities.
- A MySQL database storing blog content, such as content posts and comments as well as customized options that you manually set in the WordPress admin area
A full WordPress backup involves both parts, while cheap web hosts offer database-only backup plans.
In this article we will talk about making a full WordPress site backup by using already existing plugins.
Automatic WordPress Backup
Today we will cover only the automatic backup option, by using plugins. The following is a list of great plugins that offer automatic back up:
Duplicator Free WordPress Plugin
“Duplicator gives WordPress users the ability to migrate, copy, move or clone a site from one location to another and also serves as a simple backup utility. Duplicator handles both serialized and base64 serialized string replacement. WordPress migration and WordPress backups are easily handled by this plugin.”
Duplicator has more than one million active installations. Requiring WordPress 4.5+, this plugin enable users to:
- Move, migrate or clone a WordPress site between domains or hosts
- Pull down a live site to localhost for development
- Manually backup a WordPress site or parts of a site
- Duplicate a live site to a staging area or vice versa
- Bundle up an entire WordPress site for easy reuse or distribution
- Perform a full WordPress migration without struggling with messy import/export sql scripts
BackWPup Free WordPress Plugin
BackWPup is a backup plugin that can be used to save the complete WordPress installation, and push everything to an external service, like Dropbox or S3. For full support, the Pro version is favorable. Special features include:
- Database Backup (needs mysqli)
- WordPress XML Export
- Generate a file with installed plugins
- Optimize Database
- Check and repair Database
- File backup
- Backups in zip, tar, tar.gz, tar.bz2 format (needs gz, bz2, ZipArchive)
- Store backup to directory
- Store backup to FTP server (needs ftp)
- Store backup to Dropbox (needs curl)
- Store backup to S3 services (needs PHP 5.3.3, needs curl)
- Store backup to Microsoft Azure (Blob) (needs PHP 5.3.2, curl)
- Store backup to RackSpaceCloud (needs PHP 5.3.2, curl)
- Store backup to SugarSync (needs curl)
- PRO: Store backup to Amazon Glacier (needs PHP 5.3.3, curl)
- PRO: Store backup to Google Drive (needs PHP 5.3.3, curl)
- Send logs and backups by email
- Multi-site support only as network admin
Conclusion
In this article we talked about two plugins for automatic backup of WordPress websites. We think that these are two of the best choices for many users, with the Pro versions especially usefull when the website is a business-related one. However, it is also possible to perform a full manual backup: this procedure is more complex, and it’s a good choice only when you know exactly what to do.
