How to Backup and Restore WordPress Site

There is a huge importance of data management when it comes to any website. If there is an unfortunate disaster, protecting your data comes first. Hence, it is essential for you to understand how you can backup and restore your database in the WordPress website. Without knowing that, your website can altogether be pretty vulnerable!

When You Need to Backup and Restore WordPress Site?

There can be several reasons which indicate that taking a backup is necessary. Some of the most common ones are:

• If any plugin or theme upgrade has somehow broken your website.
• If your website is hacked and the available files are corrupted.
• If you decide to switch hosting companies.
• Your files are compromised due to the hacking of your hosting account.

How Can You Go for a Backup?

Well, there are multiple WordPress backup plugins that you can opt for. All that you need to understand is which one will suit your website the most and that’s it!

Check Out the Excellent Backup Plugins

First of all, there are some of the most amazing plugins available out there now which seem to be perfect for WordPress backup and restore. Interestingly, all such plugins share the same principles. Hence, it is not at all a tough task to use them in order to keep a proper backup of your website.

What to Consider Before Choosing a Backup and Restore Plugin?

• Go for cloud backups

There are some plugins out there which can easily backup your website to various cloud storage devices like Google Drive, Dropbox etc. If you want to avail of such functionality, you need to ensure that the plugin you are using is providing stable support to your desired cloud storage service.

• Opt for migration

Don’t you know about the migration of a website?

It is something which is pretty different than a simple restoration of data. It’s because this entire episode involves changing the domain name. You’ve to run a find and replace on your database which is present in phpMyAdmin. Thus, if you assume that you might migrate your WordPress site, you should consider such a plugin which supports migration.

• Consider an automatic one

If you’re planning to go for a plugin, you don’t have to leave your backups to chance. It is recommended that you should choose a backup and restore plugin which allows you to automatically schedule your backup to run at certain intervals.

• Look for reliable backup recovery

It is pretty surprising but true that most of the backup plugins don’t offer a safe restoration of data. Mostly, the free backup plugins end up with enough errors while taking the backup of any WordPress site. Under such a circumstance, when you website is down and you want to take a backup immediately, facing any hassle in restoring the data can seem to be pretty annoying. So, make sure that you are choosing the right sort of backup plugin to restore all your data safely.

Examples of the Most Effective Plugins

UpdraftPlus

The free version of UpdraftPlus is able to create automatic backups which can run on a specific and preferred schedule. If you spend just $ 70 to go for the premium version, you’ll gain successful access to many cloud options. When it comes to restoration, you can do that with the help of this plugin to access your database and full site both. If you think that your website is large enough, this plugin can diversify into multiple archives to ensure that the backup process is reliable.

VaultPress

The company which has gifted us WordPress is also the name behind VaultPress. With this, you can control your backup efficiently while running automatic backups and storing backups in the cloud.   All that you need to do is click on a button which is present inside your WordPress account to restore your website.

BackupBuddy

It is one of the most premium backups and restores plugin which comes from iThemes. If you use BackupBuddy, you can very easily organize automatic full-site backups to various cloud storage services like GoogleDrive, Dropbox, Amazon S3 and so on. A yet another best part of this plugin is that you can download backups to your local computer very easily which is actually one of the most essential parts of the backup strategy.

Apart from these, there are many other worthy WordPress backup plugins out there, namely, Duplicator, BackWpup,BlogVault etc.

The Ultimate Strategy

All of these plugins can successfully take a back up and restore your WordPress site. However, it is a crucial step to use them in the right way. You must remember that keeping a track on your backup is very important irrespective of which plugin you’ve opted for.

Hence, to ensure that you’re accessing a viable backup, follow the famous 3-2-1 rule.

What Is a 3-2-1 Rule?

It is a specific backup strategy which ensures that the user always has altogether three total backups of his/her site. A couple of such backups seem to be local and the third one should be offsite. Got it now? It’s a three-two-one!

An example of a backup scenario which meets the 3-2-1 rule can be to store a copy of your website on your computer, USB drive, and a cloud storage provider. While following this strategy, you’ll always have the access to at least one viable backup of your website.  

An Outline: Backup and Restoration of WordPress Website

Whether you are using any of the aforementioned plugins, the basic backup process seems to be almost the same in each case. Here’s the simplified interpretation of taking backup with the BackWPup plugin.

• Take the backup
• Generate Backup jobs with BackWPup
• Go for restoring the database from backup
• Restore the files
• Come up with a lesson summary

So, now you’ve got a clear idea about how various plugins work for taking a proper backup of any WordPress website. Also, you’ve got to know about the striking strategy that works behind a successful backup and restoration of any WordPress website.

Thus, don’t wait anymore! Just go out there and start saving your integral WordPress files without any more ado. Not even a single piece of important data in the database of your website or cPanel should get wasted!