Recently I have been trying many free WordPress’ backup plugins that are currently uploaded to WordPress.org. I do have a backup plan but it’s manual and I was looking for something automated — where the backup jobs would be performed at a given time interval.
One thing I didn’t do was to try some of the premium or paid versions like VaultPress, but because I was so frustrated with all of the plugins I tried, I just decided to stick with my currently plan instead.
Some of the plugins I tried have good descriptions and lots of compelling reviews, but none worked like the way I wanted them to. For instance, one plugin with good reviews promised to backup my site and its database to Google Drive. The problem with that plugin is it took too god-damn-long to complete. About 6 hours or more and not all the files were backup when it was finished.
Another that promised to backup my files to Dropbox also failed. I know this site is big, above 5GB of data, but it shouldn’t take more than 6 hours to get one site backup to Google Drive or Dropbox. So I gave up and I’m sticking to my current plan.
Here’s my current plan. I registered for a free Amazon EC2 cloud storage and installed Centos OS. I then I added few GB of storage to host my backups. Once every week, I sign on to this site using SSH and backup my data and files by running the commands below.
For the Database, I run the line below.
mysqldump -u root -p database_name > database_name.sql
I enter my password and wait for the database dump to complete. I then run the following commands to backup my site.
tar -cvf wordpress.tar /var/www/
Wait for the files to be backed-up. When it’s done, I sign on my Amazon server and remotely copy the data over to it using scp commands.
scp [email protected]:/backup/wordpress.tar /backups/
Do the same for the database and voila, my backups take about 10 mins (10 minutes) to completely move the files over to Amazon storage. I then shutdown the server when the backup is done so I don’t get charged.
That’s better than 6 hours and not sure if all your data were backed-up.
If something happens to the site (hackers hacked it or the server crashed) I will be able to completely restore the data. I have don’t it once, after I mistakenly deleted my server data.
I don’t know if you’re having any success with WordPress backup plugin, but if you do, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.
My monthly bill from Amazon ranges from $.60 to $1.20. Less than $2 per month.
Enjoy!