It’s a sad fact of life that websites can get hacked, and when that happens it’s possible you can lose all your data and hard work. Server crashes, malicious hacks, and database corruption are all things that can, and have happened to me and many other people. Hopefully it will never happen to you, but remember the old saying:

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst”

You don’t always need to restore from a backup, but often it’s easier to wipe the slate clean and start again. You may feel you don’t need to backup WordPress. After all, your web host will keep backups, right? Maybe, or maybe not. It depends on what package you have, and also the frequency of backups. You may lose a day, a week, a month or everything.

My philosophy is that you can never backup enough

It’s all very well knowing that you have to backup, but what exactly should you be backing up? For a full backup and complete restore you need two elements: WordPress Files and WordPress database.

WordPress files – You can manually backup the files and folder via FTP, or File Manager. Your wp-config.php and .htaccess files don’t change so once you have them, in future you only need to download the wp-content folder via FTP.

The wp-content folder contains a few things that you might find a pain to replace – your theme, plugins and upload. Your theme and plugins can usually be replaced unless you make customizations, but remembering what plugins you have installed or what theme customizations you had can be difficult, so it’s easier to download them and have them somewhere you can easily upload them from to restore the originals if necessary.

Uploads can be more difficult to replace, as these are usually uploaded images that you have used for posts potentially years ago. So back them up and it’ll save you hassle in the future, allowing you to easily restore any lost images.

WordPress database – WordPress works off a MySQL database, so the content of your site, posts, pages, comments, categories, tags and settings are not stored in files on your web host’s server, but in a database.

So it is very important that this database is backed up as it contains all your hard work and changes whenever you update your website.

You can back this up manually via your web host Control Panel. Selecting the MySQL administration tool, often called phpMyAdmin you can see your database(s).

The latest version of WordPress often contains security fixes, “hardening” (to make it more difficult to hack, and bug fixes. Major versions offer feature improvements as well, but with minor version releases it can be essential to upgrade for bug and security reasons.

As with WordPress itself, plugins and themes are often updated to fix bugs, upgrade out-of-date components and correct potential security holes (as well as adding features of course). They can also provide compatibility updates for the latest version of WordPress.

If upgrading your theme will mean losing your changes, then “you’re doing it wrong”! Theme changes should be done in a Child Theme in order to avoid losing changes when the main “parent” theme is updated.

In some cases Child Themes can have updates. In this case changes are usually handled through the Child Theme options, you still shouldn’t change any core files, so when they are overwritten your changes should still be saved in the database.

However if you REALLY don’t want your theme to be updated please contact me and we can try to work something out.

The WBYB Backup Update and Security Monitoring Service, is a service that keeps regular backups of your WordPress powered websites, keeps WordPress, plugins and themes up to date, monitors your site for any security issues, 24×7 and provides the opportunity to restore your sites to an earlier version if there are any problems. With no hassle for you, just set up and forget

A plugin needs to be installed and kept active on your site, I can do this or you can. You can provide me with a temporary login/password and change it afterwards, as long as it is an administrator level access. WBYB Bus only needs the details the plugin provides when activated which are:
1) Your URL.
2) An administrator username (not your password).
3) The API key the plugin creates for you.
With this information I do not need access to your website.

In order to request a restore, simply contact me.

If other backups are failing there is usually a good reason and the WBYB backup will likely fail too. Usually you’re on a shared host with a restricted/limited PHP memory limit and the server is “timing out” while trying to process the large amount of data. If this occurs after you have signed up, we can try to fix it, but if that fails we can either do a database only backup, or if even that fails (or you don’t wish to do a database only backup) you will receive a refund.

If the WBYB service is unable to backup and/or upgrade your site, we will cancel your account and refund you for the time period that we’ve been unable to backup your site.[/accordion]
[accordion title=’Can/should I also use other backup methods?’]Absolutely! You should always have more than one backup in place. I recommend the free WP DB Backup plugin to email you a database only backup. Remember my motto “You can never have too many backups

Simply contact me.