[sc:wordpress-category ]In the JumbleCat birthday article on WordPress plug-ins, I missed one new plug-in I’ve found lately.
An important part of the administrative tasks of running a website of any kind is backing up your data. WordPress has two components, the WordPress files (the core distro, plug-ins, themes, etc.) and the database. Manually backing up these files is pretty straight forward, but if your hosting provider doesn’t support shell access (like mine), then you have to pull down each file individually with an SFTP client and use the web front end to the database to extract the data.
This process is relatively long because JumbleCat is currently has several thousand small files in its directory structure which takes quite a while to download one at a time through SFTP.
I’ve been looking for a good backup plug-in for WordPress for a while, there are several available that backup to online stores or are commercial software but those didn’t fit my requirements.
Instead I found Total Backup, not to be confused with the other Total Backup available.
Total Backup is a nice, simple app that will grab all your files and databases and zip them up for you. You can then download the zip through the web interface.
Installation is through the standard WordPress plug-in feature and once installed you have just a couple of options to configure:
- Where to store the archive files generated by Total Backup
- Directories to exclude from the backup
After that your ready to go!
The backup page lists any backups you have made so far (and the option to delete them) and a single button to execute a backup. And that’s it.
It works quite well, it does however put your site in to maintenance mode while it executes the backup.
I did find a single “bug”, after executing a new backup a new entry in the backup list is created but the delete button is not added to the line. Simply re-loaded the page solves the problem.
It’s a great plugin which greatly simplifies the backup process in WordPress.
