by Robert B. Gelman
Not to be a fear monger, but it happened again this week. One of my hosting clients who had experienced the loss of her site before, once again needed to restore her site to the way it as before she accidentally lost one of her key WordPress plugins . It’s wrenching when this happens because it was an avoidable problem.
More serious is the situation where a site gets accidentally blown away by a misstep, or intentionally vandalized by hackers. You need to have a plan for minimizing the impact of these kinds of things, because it is only a question of when your time will come.
Think if it this way: what if your life insurance policy could actually bring you back to life when you died? Everybody would have a policy then, right, no matter the cost. Well, a backup and recovery plan for your web site (or your home computer for that matter) is exactly that kind of policy. Many of the choices you have for this plan are free or inexpensive, so I most certainly recommend everyone reading this message get started today, if they don’t already have something in place.
Here is a list complied by Kevin Eklund of Tomuse.com:
WordPress Backup Solutions
• WP DB Manager – Created by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan, this is the most popular WordPress backup plugin to date. The plugin permits the WP blog owner to schedule automatic backups of his site’s database (via email or server backup) or manually download it. It also allows the admin to select which database table items to backup and either optimize, repair, delete, or restore the database. Perhaps the most enticing aspect of this WP backup plugin is that it is very easy to install and use. The major drawback of this plugin however, is that it merely backs up your database and not your entire WordPress blog.
• WP DB Backup – Created by Austin Matzko, this backup plugin for WordPress lets you schedule an automatic database backup of your WP website. It’s very much like the WP DB Manager in that it can be scheduled to backup as frequently as you want and the backup file can be sent to an email address of your choosing.
• Backupify – Backupify is a service that backs up your online data across numerous popular online services (i.e. Flickr, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Their WordPress backup plugin is not a complete WordPress backup solution as it only backs up your WP database.
• VaultPress – Automattic, owner of WordPress, now offers its own backup service for self-hosted WordPress sites. Future plans for this service includes the ability to monitor your WP blog and alert you when it identifies a potential security threat or any suspicious activity. Further development of this WordPress backup service also includes automatic security updates. The service itself is projected to cost approximately $15 to $20 per month.
• BackupBuddy – Available from iThemes, this premium WordPress backup plugin is designed to not only backup your entire WP site but to help you restore it and migrate it elsewhere when needed. As suggested this plugin backs up everything associated with your WP website including plugins, themes, widgets, and the database. Users can schedule backups either daily, weekly, bi-monthly or monthly. Once the backup is completed, it will then be stored via email or an FTP account depending on the admin’s preferences. The WordPress blog restoration and WordPress blog migration features are powerful time saving functions that make this plugin particularly useful. The cost of this premium WP plugin is based on the type of plan you choose; personal ($25), business ($75), or developer ($150). Membership plans include automatic upgrades and access to online forum support. The only disadvantage I can see to this service is that the support and upgrades access is limited to only one year. Thus, once the membership expires, you’d have to essentially buy the plugin again to extend your membership for another year. However, compared to the monthly reoccurring fee VaultPress charges for such a complete backup solution, this pricing seems very reasonable.
• blogVault – A premium WordPress backup plugin that backs up all files, themes, plugins, comments, widgets, posts, and pages associated with your WP blog. The blogVault plugin creates automatic backups of your entire WP site and saves it to blogVault’s Amazon S3 servers. The blogVault service will cost you between $25 and $99 per year depending on the amount of storage you use.
• WordPress Backup – Developed by Blog Traffic Exchange, this free WP backup plugin permits admins to create backups of directories containing images, themes, and plugins. Users can schedule WP backups to automatically occur every day and have the resultant zip file sent to an email address.
Non-Wordpress Site Backup Options
The first thing I’s recommend is to see if your web hosting service offers a backup and restore application that you can access via your control panel. Ours does, at only $15 per year, but it is limited to files stored, not including your SQL databases. Of course you can manually backup your files and databases (export and download to your harddrive), but this is not a great solution since most people forget or don’t store the exported files properly in a remote location. So I recommend an automated solution such as one of those detailed below (by Amit Agarwal).
Online Backup Services with Free Storage
If you only have a limited amount of data (< 2 GB) on your computer that you want to store in the cloud, any of the following backup services should solve your problem without you having to shell out a penny.
All the above online backup services (except for SkyDrive) work in a similar way – you download a small client to your desktop, mark the local folders that you want to backup online and the tool will automatically monitor and upload files from these folders to the cloud. Once your files are backed up, you can also access them online except in Mozy.
Of all these services, my favorites are SugarSync and ZumoDrive. They offer almost an identical set of features and are extremely easy to configure. SugarSync is available for Mac and Windows while ZumoDrive also offers a Linux client.
While Dropbox is also an awesome service for file synchronization and online backup, it has one major limitation – it will only backup files and folders that are placed inside the Dropbox folder. Hopefully this will change in future versions.
Subscription Based Online Backup Services
When 2 GB is insufficient to store the massive number of photographs, emails, documents and other important files that are piled up on your hard drive, you can go for a subscription based service. Here are some good options along with their pros and cons.
1. Backblaze (tour) – The true ‘set it and forget it’ backup service
- Extremely easy to setup. The service will automatically backup your entire computer excluding folders that contain the OS and your applications.
- If you create a new folder on your computer, you don’t have to remember to add it to the backup queue.
- The option to restore files from the backup could have been a bit simpler.
- Check their interactive features comparison chart: https://www.cloudwards.net/comparison/
2. Carbonite (tour) – Makes data recovery really simple
- Colored dots on your files and folders indicate the status of your backup at a glance. No dot means the file is not selected for backup.
- You can remote access your backups from anywhere using the browser and there are apps for iPhone and BlackBerry.
- The restore function in Carbonite is done pretty nicely and you can recover files using Windows Explorer itself.
- Carbonite’s web interface is clean but their desktop client looks old and a bit untidy.
3. Mozy (tour) – The original cloud backup service
- Mozy will automatically group your files and folders into “sets” like documents, emails, photos, music, etc. so it becomes easy for you to select stuff that you want to backup online.
- In addition to online backup, the more recent version of Mozy can also back up your data to an external disk.
- Mozy offers quite a few easy ways to restore files from the backup.
4. iDrive (tour) – For quick and easy backups
- When you start iDrive, it offers a folder tree of your computer – just select the folders that you want to backup online and you’re done.
- You can also add files and folders to the backup queue with a simple right click inside Windows Explorer.
- You can restore data through the iDrive desktop client. Individual files and folders can also be recovered from iDrive’s website.
- Their Family plan can help you backup multiple computers to a single IDrive account.
5. CrashPlan (tour) – One backup service for all platforms
- With CrashPlan, you can easily backup your files to multiple locations including the cloud, to another folder on the same hard-disk, to other computer on your home network or to any other Internet connected computer (social backup).
- The desktop client is intuitive and won’t confuse you with a plethora of options.
- CrashPlan is among the very few online backup services that’s available on all platforms including Windows, Mac and Linux.
6. Jungle Disk (tour) – Metered online storage
- Jungle Disk uses Amazon S3 for data storage.
- You can use a single license to backup multiple computers.
- Jungle Disk supports Windows, Mac and Linux.
7. SugarSync (tour) – Access your backups from any mobile device
- SugarSync works in near real-time and will immediately back up any file changes that are made in one of the monitored folders.
- You can easily access your backups over the web or from any of your mobile devices through apps.
- SugarSync is not integrated with Windows Explorer and therefore it is a bit cumbersome to add new folders for backup.
8. ZumoDrive (tour) – Simple and elegant
- ZumoDrive is extremely easy to configure – just right click any folder on your computer and add it to the ZumoDrive cloud.
- Restoring files from ZumoDrive may involve some effort. It offers ZIP archives of your folders that you’ll have to manually extract to the right locations.
Online Backup Services Compared
The following chart compares the cost, available storage and other essential features of all the previously mentioned online backup services.
Which Online Backup Service Should You Use?
If you are looking for an extremely simple way to backup your entire Mac or Windows PC without having to select individual files and folders, go with BackBlaze. It offers unlimited storage and requires no configuration but restoring data from BackBlaze is not very convenient.
SugarSync is another brilliant option for creating online backups as it works across multiple computers (and platforms) and you can access your data on a variety of devices. However, if you have loads of data to backup, SugarSync can get a bit pricey.
The backup service that has impressed me the most is CrashPlan – it’s available for Mac, Windows and Linux. What’s unique about CrashPlan is that it also can create local backups on other computers that are either owned by you or your friends. Thus data restoration will become extremely fast in the event of a hard disk failure because you won’t have to download backups from the Internet.
The downside with CrashPlan is that it doesn’t offer web access to your backups. If you see this as a limitation, go with Carbonite. It integrates very nicely with Windows Explorer, you can backup any file or folder with a simple right-click and all your files can accessed over the web anytime, anywhere. Data restoration is also easy with Carbonite.
