Whether you’re a full time or part time blogger one thing remains the same: You put a lot of long hours and hard work into your blog.
How Would You Feel if you Lost Your Blog to a Hacker?
My blogs are an important part of my life and my business, and the recent spate of WordPress site hacks has made me think hard about what it would mean to lose one of my own blogs in that way.
What I realised is that even though I have backups of my WordPress databases, my custom themes, and can install and configure WordPress in my sleep, what I don’t have is a lot of time. Having to recover one of my blogs from a hack would be a huge pain and cost me a lot of time that frankly I don’t want to waste on something like that.
No, WordPress Doesn’t Handle Backups Itself, You Need a Backup Plugin
In the excitement of starting a blog some people don’t realize that WordPress doesn’t have any builtin backup. And you can’t rely on your web host to protect you, their only concern is being able to recover most of the data from a complete server failure.
Your web host is no help to you if your WordPress database gets corrupted, or if you accidentally destroy your theme by trying to customize it. Or worse, if a hacker slips some malicious code into your site and you don’t notice for weeks. Most web hosts can only restore your site from the previous day’s backup (if they’ll even restore it for you at all).
I Bought a WordPress Backup Plugin: Backup Buddy
I’d been looking at the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin for a while and, in light of all the recent WordPress hacks, I finally decided to buy a license and give it a try. Within the first week it had paid for itself. It solved the biggest problem I’d been having with my previous WordPress backup routine, which saved me a LOT of time.
But more on that in a minute. First lets get stuck into this review of the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin.
What is Backup Buddy?
First a little bit about the plugin itself. Backup Buddy is a WordPress backup plugin developed by the team at iThemes. It starts at $45 USD for a 2-site license which will be enough for most bloggers, but there is also a 10-site license available for a little more, and a Developer license which allows you to use this handy little WordPress backup plugin unlimited sites.
For your money, you get an amazing WordPress backup plugin, access to the iThemes support forums, and upgrades for 12 months.
For this review I’ll demonstrate how the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin works, using a demo WordPress blog.
Demo Blog - Let's install the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin
How to Install Backup Buddy
After you pay for your license and download the files from iThemes, Backup Buddy is installed like other WordPress plugins. You simply upload it to your site via FTP, or using the Install Plugins interface in the WordPress admin area.
Activate the plugin when it has been uploaded to your WordPress blog.
WordPress backup plugin, Backup Buddy, ready to be activated
You’ll notice a warning that your license has not been entered. The license for this WordPress backup plugin is only needed for upgrades, but you should sort it out now anyway.
Licensing your Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin
All you have to do is click on Manage Licenses, enter your iThemes username and password, create a key, and the site is now licensed.
How to Backup WordPress
The Backup Buddy controls appear in their own area of the WordPress admin page.
Getting started with the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin
Clicking on the Getting Started menu item takes you to a page that explains step by step exactly what to do next. This is one of the great things about Backup Buddy, all of the actions are clear and easy to understand.
Step-by-step instructions provided by the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin
The first full backup you run might take a while, depending on how big your blog is. Once it’s done you can download the file to your computer (or if it is not too large you can send it to yourself as an email). Make sure you also download a copy of the ImportBuddy.php file and keep it with your backups.
The Create Backup screen of the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin
Scheduling Backups
Backup Buddy also includes a scheduler that you can use to automate your WordPress backups. You can schedule backups for just the WordPress database, or schedule full backups that include all files on the blog as well.
Scheduling a backup with the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin
If you choose to send backups via email, they are sent to the email address you configured in your settings.
Note: backup schedules will vary from blog to blog, depending on things such as posting frequency and how many comments you get. Very popular blogs backup up daily and even hourly, while less heavily trafficked blogs can often get away with weekly. Just think about how often your blog is changing and aim for a frequency that you’re comfortable with.
Restoring a Backup of WordPress
This is my favourite part of Backup Buddy, and it’s the feature that solves my biggest problem.
I mentioned earlier that recovering a hacked WordPress blog from my current backup routine would take up a lot of my valuable time. Backup Buddy solves this by having one of the fastest, simplest recovery routines I have ever seen in a WordPress backup plugin.
Imagine your blog has been hacked. All the files and the database tables are potentially riddled with hidden spam links and back doors for the hackers to get back in later. You can’t trust any of it; it’s time to overwrite it by restoring from backup.
This is all you need to do:
- Upload the backup ZIP file and the importbuddy.php file to your web host using FTP
- Browse to http://<yourdomain>/importbuddy.php and follow the prompts to restore the backup
The Backup Buddy importer will step you through the process of recovering your entire WordPress blog.
Restoring with the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin
During step 4 you’ll need to confirm some information about your blog. Notice that you can choose a URL for the site. This is how you can use Backup Buddy to migrate a WordPress blog from one domain to another, for example from a dummy domain that was used to develop a new blog over to the real domain when it is launched. This is yet another killer feature of Backup Buddy.
You can migrate to a new URL with the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin, too
You can also change the database settings if they need to be different. Make sure that the database login test is successful before you proceed further.
Changing your database settings with the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin
Proceed with the restore process and your site should recover to its previous state (from the last backup). When you’re happy that the site has been successfully restored you simply remove the backup ZIP file and the importbuddy.php file from your site, so that no-one can maliciously overwrite your WordPress blog.
For me, the restore process with the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin was quite painless. The only problem I ran into was that the importbuddy.php file had the debug flags set incorrectly, so the first time I ran it, the files and database weren’t actually restored. (Note: iThemes has now fixed this after I mentioned it in their forums. Great support!)
Conclusion – The Best WordPress Backup Plugin to date
Overall I found Backup Buddy to be the best WordPress backup plugin that I’ve tested so far, thanks largely to its very simple recovery process, which is a huge time saver over any of my previous restore options.
Update
After I wrote my original review of the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin, the iThemes team added support for backing up to Amazon S3 cloud storage. I now run Backup Buddy on all of my own WordPress blogs as well as the blogs of several friends and clients. I back them up to Amazon S3 for just a few cents per month.
If you aren’t backing up your WordPress blogs yet, or you’re not confident in the backups that you do have, I recommend buying the Backup Buddy WordPress backup plugin for peace of mind, at a very good price.
Image Credit: Flickr
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
How do you know if your site has been hacked? Would this “save you” if your computer crashed? Right now I have WP back up and Firewall- but hands down restoring WP would be like poking a needle in my eye.
I have Thesis on my computer- does this just fall in place with the back up?
If this is not the appropriate arena for these questions, I apologize.
Good questions. I’m planning some *much* more comprehensive content about all this, but to get started:
1) Although some of the hacks are quite devious and try to stay hidden, others will be fairly obvious such as unexplained popup ads appearing when you browse your site.
2) Backup Buddy protects my blogs. I protect my PC by backing it up to external hard drive, and also using Carbonite.com
3) Thesis stores all its settings in the WP database and the normal theme folder area, so the backup/recovery handles Thesis too.
Hope that helps a bit.
Paul-
Yes, your answers did clear things up- thank you for taking the time to answer them so promptly ;-) as well as writing such straightforward, helpful posts.
Just wanted to give folks heads up- there is a buddybackup that is NOT what Paul is talking about- it is a free backup- but this is not the one he is talking about- best thing to do is go through hyperlink here ;-)
Swell review, great walk-through, exactly what I was looking for and having a pro like you use, advise on (good support!), and approve takes all the guess-work out of it for me.
Even your comments section is helpful ~ !
Keep up the good works,
~GirlPie
Nice review Paul.
I must admit I was wondering where the value of a premium backup plug-in was until you explained the reinstallation process. Definitely something I will be checking out.
Fooey…a paid plugin? Damn my poorness!
I have 20 blog in one share host that another 19 blog are addon domain I want move it to new server . if I install Backup Buddy on main domain all addon domain automatic backup by Backup Buddy ?. is it necessary to add on each domain on new server again manually and create new db ?? or is it automatically restore ??
FUJI, my understanding is that Backup Buddy is installed on one blog and backs up only that blog. If you’re running 20 different WordPress blogs I would assume that means 20 installs of Backup Buddy.
But it would be worth asking the sales team at iThemes.com just in case.
iThemes offers three different plans: the personal plan lets you back up two sites; the business plan lets you back up 10 sites; the developer plan lets you back up unlimited sites. The pricing (currently $45, $75 and $150 respectively) is per year.
I’ve just signed up and also created an Amazon S3 account to store my backups. I’m getting this done before I upgrade my sites to WordPress 3.0. I’m just about to test restoring my primary blog to a new domain to see how that goes.
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