A Bristol Geek

Dropbox WordPress

BackWPup is the second WordPress backup plugin that I have featured in my Plugins list.  I have now moved over to using this to satisfy my backup needs, as it provides some extra functionality over WP-DB-Backup.

What can it do?

BackWPup provides an automated backup solution for your WordPress Blog, it can back up three different aspects of your site:

1. A WordPress XML Export that can be re-imported natively to another WordPress blog, this includes all your posts, pages, comments along with references to where your media content was stored.  It doesn’t contain your plugins or their settings.
2. A WordPress Database Backup, this is a full backup of every setting and entry in your WordPress blog.  Each post and page is contained within the backup, with the exclusion of your media (pictures etc).  The advantage to this type of backup is that it is small and fast. You can schedule a Database backup to run every few hours without any real impact on your site.
3. A full file structure backup, this includes all of your WordPress files and plugins.  This is the only backup that also backs up your media.  It is however a more time intensive action and one that consumes more disk space.  It is however a necessary task to ensure the security of your blog.

BackWPup has a suite of features that sets it apart from the rest of the WordPress Backup Plugins, it allows you to export the backup to a number of Cloud Based solutions.  So rather than having to manually download your backups, or pick them up from an email account, you can have them sent straight to Dropbox or Amazon or one of several other services. The services that BackWPup can currently access are Dropbox, Amazon S3, Azure, Rackspace, SugerSync aswell as FTP, email and local folders. BackWPup is also capable of compressing your backups into various types of file, although you will most likely prefer to choose a ZIP file (as this is universally compatible, and offers a good level of compression).

How should I use it?

I would recommend setting BackWPup to take a backup of your database four times a day (such as 00:00, 06:00, 12:00 and 18:00), and setting it to create a full file backup once a day during your sites quite time (such as midnight). Personally I like to use Dropbox to store my backups as it ensures that they are synchronised to my laptop when I turn it on each morning.  You can sign up for a Dropbox account here.

You can set up multiple ‘jobs’ and ‘schedules’ to tailor your backup to your needs, the schedules will be run using the WP Scheduling Agent (WP-Cron).  You may wish to read my article regarding WP-Cron and the ways in which you can minimise its impact on your blog (in fact I recommend you do!).

Where can I get it from?

The best and simplist way to install any plugin is via your “Plugins” page on your blog control panel, just search for ‘BackWPup’.  Otherwise you can download it from the WordPress plugin archive here.

BackWPup is the second WordPress backup plugin that I have featured in my Plugins list.  I have now moved over to using this to satisfy my backup needs, as it...