Available from the 15th of February

Following a week of tests I have now purchased a premium plugin which can automate backups of your site and store them off of the hosting somewhere.

I have been using DropBox which is a free cloud storage facility which is also replicated on your local computer. It is now possible to backup to your organisations DropBox account and hold 8 weekly backups on a rolling basis. That is two months of backups, and it will cost you nothing, happens automatically, so you don’t have to do anything once it is configured.

If you are interested in having this added to your website I will do it on a request basis. I need you to take out a dropbox account in your organisations name, and give me the user name and password for it, then I can set it up for you.

To learn about DropBox go to here: http://www.dropbox.com

(Update 3/3/15)

With the benefit of some experience now!

Having now had a few weeks of experience using this system, it is quite verbose in it’s reporting. WordPress and the plugins frequently change and get updated. Every time something is detected as being out of date the backup system kicks in and backs up the plugin directory or other area, uploads it off the site to where ever it is supposed to go and then sends out a message, only when that has happened does the upgrade take place.

I have had some people complaining about the level of reporting. I have reviewed the system and turned off interim backups. This means you will have one snapshot per week of everything, and 8 week’s worth of them over time. Given the level of web site updating going on by their owners I think this is more than sufficient.

The reporting side will be amended to send a message if the backup has failed for any reason (like there is insufficient space). A message will go to me, and to the principal contact for the site.

Hopefully these changes will reduce both the storage requirements and also reduce the number of mail messages that are sent out.

Otherwise I think it is a great addition to the services on offer.