There are a lot of ways to back up your website files, but automatic daily backups takes the stress out of changing your site often or worrying about losing your hard work. Let’s take a look at why automatic daily backups is beneficial and how you can set it up on your own WordPress site.
What is an automatic daily backup?
An automatic daily backup is a way of saving a copy of your website files and data so that you can easily restore from a previous state if needed. Automatic daily backups are easy to set up and can be configured to save files to your computer, an online storage account, or a remote server. You can also set up a schedule for how often backups are saved.
This means that if you change something on your website (such as adding a plugin or editing a page or post), you can quickly revert back to an older version to avoid losing any work. You’ll want to make sure that you’re saving a copy of your website files in case something goes wrong and you need to restore the site from an older version.
Why should you care about automatic daily backups?
We’ve all been there: You’re adding new content, editing old posts, and tinkering around with your site’s design. Suddenly, you make a change that causes your site to break. When that happens, you usually have two options: You can either try to hack the code and fix what you broke, or you can revert to an older version of your site and try to figure out where the change happened.
Automatic daily backups can help you avoid these situations by regularly saving a copy of your site’s files so that you can revert to a previous version if something happens.
How to set up backups using UpdraftPlus?
When it comes to automatic daily backups, there are two options:
- You can either take charge and set up a backup system yourself
- Use a plugin that automates the process.
If you want your site to run smoothly, it’s worth learning how to set up automatic daily backups.
First, you’ll want to decide where to save the backup files. You can save them to your computer, an online storage account, or an external server. You can also set up a schedule for how often backups are saved. For example, you might decide to save a backup of your site every day and keep the last 14 days’ worth of backups to make it easy to revert to a previous version if needed.
The wpdod.com team uses the Updraft Plus plugin, which allows for automatic, recurring backup of both WordPress files and the database. It is available in two versions:
- Basic downloadable directly from the WordPress plugin repository
- Pro version which can be purchased directly from the developers’ website.
In the vast majority of projects, the basic version will be 100% sufficient – so we will focus on its configuration in the next section.
Backup frequency and destination
We will first be interested in the Settings tab. This is where we will define the 2 most important things about future backups:
- Schedule WordPress database and file backups. From several possible options such as: manual, every few hours, daily, weekly, monthly we would recommend choosing daily backups. Then we do not have to remember to manually click it and also the number of saved versions of the page is in our opinion the most optimal.
- The place where the created security copies should be stored. At this point in the back of your mind, you should always keep in mind that keeping backups on the same server where the site is located is not the best solution – in the case of a server failure, you are left without a site and without backups from which this site could be emergency restored.
Use of Amazon S3 storage
We already know that keeping files on the same server is not the best solution. So what to choose?
Most if not all of the options offered by UpdraftPlus will work – in our case, we opted to use Amazon’s storage space.
At the time of writing this article, S3 prices were $0.0245 per GB – on average, one security copy of a simple WordPress-based site weighs between 50MB and 100MB. It’s easy to calculate that one copy costs us on average $0.002 – a very low price for the stability and security of your website.
From the list of available options, we choose Amazon S3 – in the inputs in the next section, we need to enter the access credentials that we find in our Amazon account. After clicking on the name of our account in the upper right corner, we are interested in the following:
- Security credentials
- Access keys (access key ID and secret access key)
- Select Create New Access Key
The access key and succes key data that we will see on the screen we need to enter in the UpdraftPlus integration settings with Amazon S3.
The last step is to specify the path where our files should be saved after logging in. Remember that the path you enter must start with the name of the bucket you created. For example – s3://wpdod/updraft/ – where wpdod is the name of the bucket and updraft is the name of the folder which you want to create and upload further backups to.
There is nothing left to do but to test whether WordPress correctly establishes a connection to the remote storage.
Don’t clutter your drive
At this stage, backups should have already been created automatically. However, remember to manage your remote disk properly – backups are created every day taking up more and more space. The space for which you pay a monthly subscription – we would suggest leaving only backups up to 14-21 days back. We can remotely delete older copies directly from the WordPress dashboard.
If you have any questions, problems regarding your site or UpdraftPlus configuration – we are at your service – write a comment or get back to us directly on email!
