Automatically Backup Your WordPress Sites to a FTP Server

This brief tutorial is going to show you how to create a bash script that will automatically backup your WordPress site and database to a FTP server at a specific time and date.

If you own a personal blog or website and you want to make sure that your blog can be restored in the event something terrible happens, then you’ll want to setup a backup and restore process. Using some WordPress plugins might get the job done, but I haven’t seen a complete plugin for WordPress that will backup your blog’s database and content via FTP automatically. I have tried many out there and they just couldn’t do it correctly.

So, I searched online and came upon this bash script that works. I modified it a bit for it to work in most environment, and all you need to do is add your FTP Server, Password, and the blog directory you wish to backup.

Objectives:

• Backup WordPress Sites to a FTP Server Automatically
• Enjoy!

To get started, create a new file called backup.sh   in your /root directory. Then copy and pastes the content below into the file and save.

Replace the highlighted lines with information of your systems.

#!/bin/bash


# Copyright 2008, 2010 Guy Rutenberg <http://www.guyrutenberg.com/contact-me>

# WordPress FTP backup 2.0

#

# Easily backup wordpress instances via ftp.

#

# Change Log:

# ===========

# 2.0:

#  - Auto-detect database settings.

#  - Exclude cache data from backups.

BACKUP_DIR=/var/www/html/wordpress   
FTP_HOST=ftp_hostname
FTP_USER=ftp_username
FTP_PASS=ftp_user password
FTP_BACKUP_DIR=/var/www/html/wordpress
# end of configuration - you probably don't need to touch anything bellow


PROG=`basename "$0"`

print_usage () {

    echo "USAGE: ${PROG} [options] BLOG_ROOT"

    echo "Backup a WordPress blog"

}


print_help ()  {

    print_usage

    cat << EOF


Options:

    -h, --help          show this help message and exit


EOF

}


TEMP=`getopt -o h --long help -n "$PROG" -- "$@"`

if (($?)); then

    print_usage

    exit 1

fi


eval set -- "$TEMP"


while true ; do

    case "$1" in

        -h|--help) print_help; exit ;;

        --) shift; break;;

    esac

done


if [ -z "$1" ]

then

 print_usage > /dev/stderr

 exit 1

fi


BLOG_DIR=$1

DB_NAME=`echo "<?php require_once(\"${BLOG_DIR}/wp-config.php\"); echo DB_NAME;" | php`

DB_USER=`echo "<?php require_once(\"${BLOG_DIR}/wp-config.php\"); echo DB_USER;" | php`

DB_PASS=`echo "<?php require_once(\"${BLOG_DIR}/wp-config.php\"); echo DB_PASSWORD;" | php`

DB_HOST=`echo "<?php require_once(\"${BLOG_DIR}/wp-config.php\"); echo DB_HOST;" | php`


BLOG_DIR=`dirname "$BLOG_DIR"`/`basename "$BLOG_DIR"`

BACKUP_DIR=`dirname "$BACKUP_DIR"`/`basename "$BACKUP_DIR"`


echo -n "dumping database... "

DUMP_NAME=${DB_NAME}-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.bz2

mysqldump --user=${DB_USER} --password=${DB_PASS} --host=${DB_HOST} \

 --databases ${DB_NAME} \

 | bzip2 -c > ${BACKUP_DIR}/${DUMP_NAME}

if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then

        echo "failed!"

        exit 1

fi

echo "done"


echo -n "Creating tarball... "

TAR_NAME=${BLOG_DIR##*/}-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.bz2

tar -cjf ${BACKUP_DIR}/${BLOG_DIR##*/}-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.bz2 --exclude cache ${BLOG_DIR}

if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then

        echo "failed!"

        exit 2

fi

echo "done"


echo -n "Uploading SQL dump and tarball to FTP... "

ftp -nv <<EOF

open "${FTP_HOST}"

user "${FTP_USER}" "${FTP_PASS}"

put "${BACKUP_DIR}/${DUMP_NAME}"

put "${BACKUP_DIR}/${TAR_NAME}"


quit

EOF


rm -f "${BACKUP_DIR}/${DUMP_NAME}"

rm -f "${BACKUP_DIR}/${TAR_NAME}"


if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then

        echo "failed!"

        exit 3

fi

echo "done"


 
After saving the file, run this command:
chmod +x backup.sh
You must run the above command as root. 
 
After that run the commands to instantly backup your site.
/root/backup.sh /var/www/html/wordpress/
 
To schedule it to run every Sunday, open crontab and add the line below
0       3       *       *       7      /root/backup.sh /var/www/html/wordpress >/dev/null 2>&1

 
To learn more about how to schedule tasks via cron, read this post.