If I am hosting your website you will be aware that part of that service is backing up your site and should it ever happen, restoring it in the event of a failure at the hosting, or your site being hacked. I use Duplicator to handle this task, but each is handled manually, and when I drop by your site (minimum 4 times a year, or on request), I check the installation to ensure it is updated and everything looks ok.
There are many back up solutions, one of the benefits of using Duplicator is the site can be moved elsewhere fairly painlessly. Other backups can be quite fiddly to manage. I tend to go for the simplest solution so that you can use it too.
Exploring new options
On the 31st of January I am starting a program which will look at the feasibility of using automated backups of sites which can be done as frequently as every 4 hours or as long as once a month. The system is predictably more complex, and of course in every backup situation, you also need the assurance that you can recover it in the event that you need to restore something.
Unlike other plugins I have used this one I have to pay for to get the additional functionality, however if I buy a developers licence for it, then I can use it on all websites, which makes the functionality available to you.
DropBox
One way that this system can work is run an automated timed backup to a DropBox location. DropBox is available to anyone, and many people I work with have used it. You can get 2GB of space for free in the “cloud”. Think of it as a disk drive on the Internet at a remote location that you can reach provided you are connected to the Internet. If you also run the DropBox application on one or more computers that attach to the same dropbox account then you also have a local copy on every computer that is attached to the Internet. Better still as you store something locally on your computer in your DropBox, it is also stored in the cloud automatically, and any other devices also attached to the same DropBox cloud storage account also receive a copy. It all happens automatically. Hopefully you are still following this!
Connecting WordPress to DropBox
The new storage concept I am experimenting with is to add this plugin, and configure it to attach to your DropBox account. Then configure the WordPress website to backup say once a day overnight to the DropBox account and maintain a copy there. Do this for say 7 consecutive days. This means that after a week it will have seven daily backups. In two weeks, It will still have only seven backups, but for the last 7 days. At the point you turn on your computer, and it refreshes the connection with your DropBox account those backups will also be stored on your computer. So now there are two copies of backups, one on your computer and one in your DropBox account. All handled automatically.
Testing Testing 123
Over the course of February I will be experimenting with this system to see how easy it is to use. If it all works out then I will start to use this service from March 2015 on some of those sites where the users are particularly active.
Who Does What?
For any group that I work with I will need them to take out a DropBox account on behalf of their organisation. This is free. You can do that by going to here: http://www.dropbox.com.
Once you have your account set up, you may either pass the credentials to me and I will set up the automated back up for you, or I will give you instructions on how you can set it up. You need to consider If you wish to use your DropBox account for other purposes, then it is better if you set up your account details yourself, then your privacy is not compromised by telling me the user name and password.
Once set up, share the backup folder with me, this only gives me access to the folder, not the full account, so I can pick occasional backups and keep a copy. The rest should be automatic.
What Frequency and how many?
The big question is how frequently should the site be backed up, and how many backups to store? I would suggest for most people a weekly backup should be sufficient. Keep say 8 backups and you have 2 months worth.
Compromised sites?
One of the issues here is that if your site was hacked, and then defaced which is where the home page is overwritten with another page saying “Mr Hacker is very clever because he hacked into your site….” then it does not necessarily follow that Mr Hacker hacked into your site at the point when the defacement appeared. So perhaps the last backup was compromised too. If this ever happens I will help you to resolve it. This is why it is important to have more than one backup.
More to follow on this once I have seen how it works and how easy it is to restore a backup. If you are interested in having this system installed on your site, first take out a DropBox account on behalf of your organisation, then contact me and we can go from there.
I will provide an update on this in around 4 weeks time when I have some experience of using it.