In this video you'll learn how to automate backups of an entire WordPress site using third party services
and plug ins while your hosting company may provide periodic backups for your sites.
It's best not to rely on only one source of backup files.
It's best to have redundancy or more than one backup in case something goes wrong.
By the end of this lesson you'll have several ways to set up automatic backups and offsite storage of
the files so that even with a catastrophic loss of your server files you'll be able to easily restore
any site from your saved backups.
Let's start by getting on the same page as it were the same website page.
That is the same website dashboard that we've been working on inside of our logged in wordpress dashboard.
I'm at my womb comer's store site.
As you remember it's Greg Davis dot com slash MailChimp and I'm on the dashboard page here.
The video here if you need to and get logged in at your own WordPress site.
Now that were logged in let's go and open up that hardening WordPress article at Wordpress dot org again
and let's just scroll down to a place I have marked in the document by highlighting some of the text.
We talk about database backups here and this is what we're going to be talking about in this video and
lesson database backups as well as file structure backups so the entire web site is backed up and ready
to restore at any point.
A sound backup strategy they say here could include keeping a set of regularly timed snapshots of your
entire WordPress installation including WordPress core files and your database in a trusted location.
So what that means is that you've got the database file and all the Wordpress core files the theme files
that you're using the plug in files that you're using and the whole uploads directory.
Basically your entire WordPress installation in a backup file in an external location separate from
your website.
It sounds a little complicated and it can be especially if you trying to do this manually on more than
one Web site that you're managing.
Luckily there's plugins and third party services that we can use to take care of this automatically.
We were looking at I theme's security plug in in the last video and as you scroll down we mentioned
they have a third party service called backup buddy.
Now the themes backup buddy is a paid for service that is very excellent but there's a number of different
free plugins available at the Wordpress repository that do a lot of the same things for free so those
free plug ins are a good place to start.
But here's a good graphic on the themes that come back up buddy web page that talks about what makes
up a good WordPress backup strategy.
First you have a full site backup the database and the files included.
You set that up on a schedule to run backups automatically whether it's daily or weekly.
You store those backups offsite so that if your entire website and hosting company go down or out of
business you still have your offsite files and then you have the ability to restore or move those backups
to a different server or to restore to the same server.
If your web site happens to go down we've also talked about WPA myu dev dot org.
The paid for premium plug in membership service that I'm a member of and one of their premium plug ins
is called snapshot Pro.
It does all the things that we need to do in terms of taking offsite and timed and scheduled backups
and it is a premium plug in as a part of their membership service but just know that you can sign up
for a free trial of WPA.
You def get this snapshot pro plugin working and then you don't have to keep your membership.
You can still keep the plugin you just don't get support and or updates.
But I use snapshot Frot quite a bit for this very thing that we're talking about.
However let's go and look at two free plug ins in the Wordpress repository that accomplish this in a
great and efficient way.
Updraft Plus is one of the most popular WordPress backup plugins in the repository.
You can see looking down here it's got eight hundred thousand or more active installations.
They do have a premium version of their service but every thing we need comes with the free service
and updraft Plus is the plug in will be installing and configuring.
In this lesson.
Another one is called back WP up and it's another popular and longtime WordPress backup plug in more
than half a million active installations and another one with a premium version.
If you want to get back WPI up pro that has more features but like updraft plus the free version works
for everything I'll be teaching in this lesson.
So let's go into the dashboard of our live Web site and it looks like since I've been logged in for
more than an hour I need to log back in with Cliff like we set up in the last video so I'm opening up
my cell phone and I'm just pointing it at the screen here and all right.
My phone has buzzed that should lug me right back in to the Web site right now that I'm logged back
in.
Follow long as I go to plug ins and the Add New button.
I'm going to be looking for updraft plus
am researching for the word updraft and there's the updraft plus WordPress backup plug in and I'll click
Install now.
Now the new installing button with its circular Arrows is there and then it gives me an activate button
right in the ad plug in screen.
So now that I've installed updraft Plus I can go down and look at its buttons here on the plugin screen
I can hit the settings button but also under settings you've got the updrafts plus backups settings
button right there updraft plus gives us a little message here.
We do need to set up a few things inside the configuration screen and that's by hitting the settings
tab the first thing we have is a files backup schedule and a database backup schedule I'm going to set
to do these every week and I'm going to allow my external storage to keep a month's worth of backups
at a time before it deletes the old ones.
That's a good system so you don't build up too much data storage and then have to upgrade and pay for
storage.
So I'm going to keep four backups of a weekly nature both in the database and the files backup schedule.
Now you can see there's a lot of different choices for remote storage here.
The updraft plus vault is one that comes with their premium service and we're going to be setting up
Dropbox if you'd like to follow along exactly how I do it in this video.
But feel free if you're a member of any of these other services to go and use them for your third party
storage.
A couple of these are part of their premium service and they do Dropbox for free.
Now I've clicked the dropbox icon and before I go any further I encourage you to open up another tab
in your browser and either sign up for or log into your Dropbox account.
Dropbox will give you two gigabytes of free storage before you need to upgrade.
And it's plenty to keep track of.
Web site backups.
So back in my dashboard since I'm already logged into Dropbox it'll be easy to authenticate with Dropbox
and now it says that all I have to do is save this page and I'm going to go ahead and include everything
in the in the backup files and I'll go back down and you can set it to send you an e-mail once it makes
its backup if you like.
This is a good way to collect those emails and then use them as a part of a client report.
If you're using Web site care plans that we'll talk about later in the course.
So I'll just click Save changes and then as I went up here and after it saved my changes gives me a
little updraft Plus notice I need to authenticate my Dropbox account so that up draft Plus can communicate
with Dropbox and upload those backup files to my personal storage offsite.
So since I'm already logged into Dropbox I can click allow right here and that's all there is to it.
It gives me a report of my Dropbox account here and updraft Plus is set up now.
It's scheduled itself to do a backup.
But what we can do in order to test the settings and make sure everything is working right is let's
make a backup manually.
So it's saying include the database.
Yes.
Include the files in the backup.
Yes.
And then I want to send this backup to remote storage.
So I'll just click back up now I can see a progress bar right down here and I hope you're following
along on your own web site and I'll pause the video and started back up when my backup is complete.
OK.
It looks like my latest log method says the backup apparently succeeded and is now complete.
And if I go over to my Dropbox folder you'll see that I now have an apps folder I open that up.
I have an updraft plus folder and inside that are some segments of my backup.
If you look at each one of these by clicking in an open area and then looking at the top you can see
that they're all different sizes and they all contain different parts of the backup that updraft Plus
we'll use in case you need to restore one of your backups.
Back inside the Wordpress dashboard you can go Under the existing backups tab shows that I have one
now and you can see their backup date and the backup data it's in five different parts and there's actions
that I can perform using this particular backup.
I can delete it view the log but more importantly I can restore this backup back to my Web site.
The last thing we'll do in this lesson is test the restoration process to make sure that it's working.
So to test a backups restoration Let's go into our pages all pages and let's look at the thank you for
confirming page that we had created in a past lesson.
I'll just open that page and I'll just hit enter and say this is a site edit before restore.
Just typing some words right here and updating this page.
Now I know that if I restore the backup that was created before I made this edit and this line will
disappear.
And so here is what I'll do I'll just right click on the permalink here and I'll say Open link in New
Tab and that way I'm looking at this.
Thank you for confirming page on my live Web site.
And here's the line.
This line should disappear after we restore the backup from before I made that edit.
So let's go back into our WordPress dashboard and let's go and restore the last backup.
So we'll just go under settings go to updraft plus backups.
And I know I need to look at my existing backups and I can say OK here's the date that I want to restore
when I go over here and click restore and I can restore even any of the parts just the database the
uploads etc..
So when we'll do this test let's go ahead and just restore everything and then we'll check out make
sure the website is still working.
So a click restore right here and it looks like it's restoring the backup it's retrieving and preparing
the backup files and processing.
Now there's one more step now that it's done that gives me a little report and it says OK.
So now I need to press restore again to precede or click restore and everything has begun.
It gives me some final checks and a report here.
And as I go back down I can see that it's done a lot of different things plug ins theme's uploads database
etc. and at the bottom here does restore successful.
And then you can return to updrafts plus or anywhere you like within the site.
But if I just go back to my thank you page tab and refresh the page can see that this line disappears.
Great I've restored the original site that we had backed up before.
So anything that had been done after the backup is now gone including any kind of hacking or any kind
of problem that had happened with the Web site.
Now I know you might be thinking boy back in one of the chapters earlier in the course we went over
site migrations moving sites from one server to the other and restoring sites with that all in one migration
plug in.
And so what's the difference.
Well there's two main differences in the utilities that we're using for this backup system and they
are that with these backup plug ins.
Not only can you schedule backups to happen on a daily or or weekly basis.
You can also save them on an offsite location you don't have to manually download them to your computer
and save them on your client's behalf.
In this lesson you learned how to create automated scheduled backups of an entire WordPress Web site
including the database and file structure and you set it up so that the backup files are saved to an
external location like Dropbox or another file storage service.
Now you can have multiple redundant backup systems set up for each of your client web sites which adds
tremendous value to your website care and maintenance services and makes it easy for you to restore
a Web site from a previous backup in case of any problems in the next video.
You'll learn how to set up your Wordpress Web sites using HTP S and S S L or secure sockets layer doing
this and Krips the data sent between a web server and the user's browser hardening security even more
and inspiring confidence to Web site users.
It also allows your server to use the HTP to protocol which is another smart way to speed up your web
sites