Most people who run a WordPress blog will realize hat even though they may have backups of their WordPress databases, and their  custom themes, actually having the time or inclination to doing a complete restore of your WordPress site is simply a pain. Whether it be for security reasons that you need to restore or a bad server situation, having to recover one of my sites from a hack would be a huge pain and cost a lot of time.

The Need for a Plugin

In the excitement of developing a blog or a web site run on a blog platform, some people don’t realize that WordPress doesn’t have any backups that are built into the system. 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’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.

What is it?

First a little bit about the plugin itself.  Backup Buddy is a WordPress backup plugin developed by the team at iThemes.  I heard Cory Miller talk at WordCamp Raleigh 2010 and was really impressed on how he ran his business. There is a 10-site license available (which I ended up getting), and a Developer license which allows you to use the backup plugin unlimited sites. 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. I decided to set mine up for multiple runs in a month.

Restoring a Backup

But the real reason I bought the plugin is for the restore option. Backup Buddy has 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:

1.    Upload the backup ZIP file and the importbuddy.php file to your web host using FTP
2.    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.

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. Actually, this is the second reason I got this plugin. I have several “sandbox” web sites I play around with and being able to develop there and then move to a live site in just a few simple steps sealed this deal for me. You cannot beat this kind of ease of use + functionality in one product.

I also love that iThemes has added 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 cloud and never have to worry about them again. Brilliant.

If you aren’t backing up your WordPress blogs yet, or you’re not confident in the backups that you do have, I can’t recommend this product enough. The support is outstanding (got help on the forums and emails for a minor question I had in less than 24 hours). That kind of support and killer functionality at a very reasonable price makes this a must have in my plugin recommendation list for any WordPress blog.