You have a backup, don’t you?

“You have a backup,
don’t you?”

Rick Radko WordCamp Toronto
r3df.com September 29th, 2012

A little bit about me

Rick Radko – R-Cubed Design Forge
 Software, web and app designer/developer.
 Creating custom web sites since 1996.
 Artistic and creative engineer.
 Co-organizer of: The Ottawa WordPress Group.
 If you have questions or need help, contact me
at: wpinfo@r3df.com.

Slides are posted at:
 http://www.slideshare.net/r3df
© 2012 Rick Radko, r3df.com 1

You have a backup, don’t you?

“You caught a virus
from your computer
and we had to erase
your brain. I hope
you had a back-up
copy!”


Backups – Why bother?

Your WordPress content is electronic data, if it’s
damaged or deleted, you could loose your entire
website.

If you lost your website, how long would it take you
to rebuild?
a) Hours?
b) Days?
c) Weeks?
d) Minutes – because I have reliable backup.

Reconstructing a site without a backup

Even small sites take significant effort to rebuild:
 Reinstalling WordPress.
 Reinstalling & setting up plugins.
 Setting up a theme (customizations?).
 Recovering content.
 Google search may have cached copies of sites.
 Rebuilding the pages from recovered content:
 A lot of cut and paste and editing work.
 Re-uploading images.

Rebuilds cost: $$ and lost uptime.

Things that can will go wrong

Hardware failures:
 Hosts don’t guarantee backups.

Accidental deletions & damage:
 Who makes mistakes? Everybody!

A short WordCamp presentation by one of the
makers of Backup Buddy and his experience with
these 2 issues.
 http://wordpress.tv/2011/01/29/matt-danner-why-you-need-
a-wordpress-backup/

More things that can will go wrong

Hacking/Malware/Virus:
 Can completely trash a site.
 May have all your files deleted.
 Could have every single file altered.
(about 3000 files in an empty WordPress install)

Updates:
 Bugs
 Incompatibility
 Update fails to complete


What to back up?

To completely back up a WordPress website, there
are 2 things that need to be backed up as a pair:
 Database
 All of your site content.
 WordPress, plugin and theme settings and config.
 Files
 WordPress files
 Plugin files
 Theme files
 Most important: UPLOADS!!!
(images & other media)

Database only backups

To restore a site, you generally need backups of
your files and database taken at the same time.

However, if don’t do any file or media uploads
(embeds are ok), only your database is changing
and you can:
 Back up your database regularly.
 Typically a small backup compared to files.
 Back up your files when they change
 After updates for example.
 Typically a much larger backup.

When to back up?

How often you back up depends on how often your
site gets changed/updated.
Consider:
 The amount of data being added regularly.
 Your posting frequency.
 Comment frequency.
 Significant change.
 How critical your site is.
Whether you back up daily, weekly or monthly
depends on how much you are willing to loose…

Making sure it happens

Regular backups, daily, weekly or monthly, should
be automated, or they will not happen regularly.
 Face it, it’s not a fun task!

A manual system that is easy to use should be
available to compliment the regular backups for
when there is significant change on the site.
 Major site revision.
 An unusual amount of new content.
 Big event, or happening?
 New product launch.

Where to backup

Off of your server!
 Default for most backup plugins is to save the
backup on your server.
 A file on your server, does not protect you against
most of the issues mentioned at the start.
 A file on your server could be a security issue.

Other points:
 Off site, especially if your server is onsite.
 Keeping 2 or 3 separate copies is recommended.
 Backup history – a period of older copies.

Getting it off the server

A while ago backup systems could email you a
backup, but backups are generally too big now:
 A complete backup of an empty WordPress install
is about 5 Meg.
 Too big for most emails.
 Gmail will take up to 25 Meg attachments, (if your
system will send it) but a lot of backups are even
bigger than that.


FTP it off the server

FTP is an option, but you need a place to FTP to:
 A common idea is to use another hosting account
somewhere.
 Most shared hosting does not allow data storage on
their servers (read the fine print in your TOS).
 Some hosting services offer storage, expensive
unless you have volume. (large corporation)


Send it to the cloud

Many plugins will let you store your backups on
one of the many cloud services.
 Amazon S3
 Dropbox
 Google Drive
 +More

This is a reasonable option for most sites.
 Cloud storage fees are quite low.
 Off site.
 Need to be aware of privacy issues.

Backup compromises

Ultimately the decision of what, when and where
to backup your site will involve assessments of
risk and possibly compromises.

For example:
 A large site may choose to do nightly database
backups and weekly file backups to reduce the
amount of data being stored.
 They will risk the effort of recovering any images
that were uploaded during the week.


How to back up

Lets look at some tools/methods to do backups.
I’ve grouped them into 4 rough categories:
 Manual backups:
 Hosting control panel – cPanel.
 Archive, SQL dump FTP.
 Backup plugins
 Backup services - New
 Site managers – Really new


Manual backups

Hosting control panel
 Most hosting control panels offer a backup option.
 Usually not automated.
 May not be very granular. (entire account only)

 You likely will also be able to backup by:
 Compressing (zip/archive) your files into an archive.
 Dumping (exporting ) your MySQL database.
(phpMyAdmin, and other tools)
 FTPing the files off the server.


Manual backups continued

The archive and SQL dump - pros:
 Very granular – any site/part of a site you want.
 Very reliable, .zip + sql dump is very portable, no
other tools needed to restore.
 Unzip the files, import the sql, done!
 Including the date, 2012-09-29 for example, in the
names of both files, helps keep backups together.
 Do need other scripts for site migration.


Manual backups continued again

The archive and SQL dump - cons:
 Several steps involved in backups and restores.
 Need to know a bit about databases to do
imports/exports.
 Some GUI tools phpMyAdmin.
 Need to know how to archive/un-archive
(compress, .zip, gzip etc.)
 Need to be comfortable with file systems on the
server – often Linux.
 No automated backups.


Backup plugins

There are a lot of choices in plugins for backup.
 Many are free. (wordpress.org)
 Some are paid.

While it was not the case as little as a year ago:
 Most of the plugins now available offer automated
backup options.
 Most now allow you to backup your choice of your
files, your database or both.


Plugin features

Key backup features:
 Automated/scheduled backups.
 A must if you want reliable backups.
 Manual backups (on demand) using the same
settings as your automated backups.
 A recommended feature.
 File/directory exclusions.
 You may have some files you don’t want backed up.
 Allows backing up database only, files only or both.
 Flexibility in your backup strategy


More plugin features

Typical backup locations:
 Backups to cloud
 Dropbox
 Amazon
 Rackspace
 Google Drive
 FTP to other servers/computers
 Email


Even more plugin features

Restore features:
 No install restores.
 Don’t need WordPress installed.
 May use an install script.
 Malware scans.
 Database optimization/repair.

Site migration:
 Important only if you want to move your site to a
new domain.
 To/from multisite.

Multisite issues

If you have multisite enabled, consider whether the
backup plugin can:
 Backup sites individually?
 Backup a sub-network?
 Restore sites individually?
 Restore a sub-network?
 Migrate a single multisite site to/from a single site
install?


Some plugins (no order, or recommendation given)

WordPress Backup to Dropbox
 http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-backup-to-dropbox/
wp Time Machine
 http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-time-machine/
BackWPup
 http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backwpup/
BackUpWordPress
 http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backupwordpress/
Backup
 http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backup/
BackupBuddy - $
 http://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy/


Automated backups and cron

From Wikipedia:
cron: The time-based job scheduler in Unix-like
computer operating systems. Cron enables users to
schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run
periodically at certain times or dates.

Unix/Linux Cron:
 Set using Unix/Linux commands. (cPanel)
 Runs at set time, or on regular intervals based on
the server clock.
 Reliable.

WordPress cron – a subtle point

WordPress cron:
 Triggered by visits to your site, NOT a clock!
 Every time someone visits your site, WordPress cron
checks to see if there were things scheduled to run
between the last visit and the current time.
 If you set a WordPress cron job for 1am, it may not
happen until the first visitor at 6am.
 Most backup plugins use WordPress cron to
automate backups.
 Most sites have enough traffic that this will not
cause major issues. (but your backups may not be
exactly on time)

Backup services

The only backup service I knew of until about a
month ago was VaultPress – from the people who
make WordPress. Now there are many.

When considering a service:
 Most of the same features as for plugins need to
be considered.
 One item that stands out is:
 Where are they storing your files?
 Secure – encrypted?

More on backup services

Unlike plugins:
 Most of the services cost.
 But they include storage.
 Threat and malware scanners are common in the
services.
 Some offer incremental backups.
 Only backup what has changed instead of the whole
site.
 Most don’t store files on your server.


A few services (no order, or recommendation given)

VaultPress
 From the people who make WordPress
 Starts at $15/month
 http://vaultpress.com/

Cloudsafe365
 Basic plan free
 Regular plans start at $15/month
 http://www.cloudsafe365.com/wordpress-backup/

BlogVault
 Starts at $9/month
 http://blogvault.net/

Site managers

Manage multiple WordPress sites from one central
admin panel.
 Offer a bunch of features for managing sites:
 Remote updates
 Add plugins themes
 Bulk postings
 Site analysis
 Backups <- included them for this option


Two site managers (no order, or recommendation given)

InfiniteWP
 Download core software - free
 Add-on options for many features - $
 http://infinitewp.com/

ManageWP
 Online service – limited account – free
 Full account - $
 http://managewp.com/


Test your backup flow!

Test your backups!
 Backups only work if you can restore!
 Back up a test site and try restoring it.
 Make sure that automated back-ups are actually
running.
 Periodically check that you can restore your
backups.

Try new backup plugins on a test site, not your live
sites.

Other links

Some information about doing database backups
in control panels:
 http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups


One final note on backups

Backup is often not spelled correctly, a bit of
Googling reveals that:

The verb form is back up in two words, whereas
the noun is backup.

 Did you back up the hard drive?
 Where did you put the backup?


Contact

Rick Radko
 email: wpinfo@r3df.com
 twitter: @r3designforge

Slides at:
 www.slideshare.net/r3df


You have a backup, don’t you?

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You have a backup, don’t you?