Back Up & Copy Your WordPress Site with Backup Buddy

Back Up & Copy Your WordPress Site with Backup Buddy

March 5th, 2010

UPDATE: As of 3/24/10, BackupBuddy has proven to be so buggy that I can no longer recommend it. Seems like a good idea, and I know that they’re working hard on this over at iThemes/PluginBuddy, but I have yet to get this to work without a hitch, and the last 2 times I attempted using this plugin were downright disastrous. Hopefully this thing will work sometime soon, but below is my review for the 1 time it kind of worked for me…

For the longest time, WordPress users have had to live with the disappointing reality that there was no simple and reliable way to backup and also migrate their entire WordPress website – database, AND files included.

Those days are officially over.

BackupBuddy: The Quick ‘n Dirty

• Great premium plugin that’s reasonably priced.
• Has a few kinks that will hopefully be worked out by the time most of you read this.
• Besides relying on your hosting company’s backup procedures, this currently is the only game in town as far as backup up your entire WordPress website.

The not-so-quick (but still dirty)

Thanks to the good folks at premium WordPress plugin marketplace, Plugin Buddy, WordPress developers now have a simple way to:

• Backup their entire WordPress website, including the database, and ALL of the files (WordPress core files, plugins, themes, etc)
• Migrate/Copy their entire website intact to a new location (new server, new directory, what-have-you)

Here’s how it works:

First, go and pick up a copy of the plugin here. (I’m not an affiliate, yet, fyi)

Since this is a premium plugin, this one actually costs money (gasp!). But in my opinion, mission-critical plugins such as this one should be premium, since premium equals support if you run into any technical hurdles while attempting to use it. There are 3 different price points to choose from, but for most of us, the $25 price option will be a good initiation, as it allows installation on 2 websites.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, you’ll need to register an activation key, but this is all done very simply from within a pop-up layer in your WordPress admin. Just follow a few easy steps and you’re good to go without leaving the admin panel (you hear that, Akismet?).

The next step is going to down to the bottom-left-hand section of your admin panel and navigating to the “Backups” page, at which point you’ll be given the following options:

• Full Backup - I recommend going this route, since this includes the database AND all of your files.
• Database Only – This will only backup the text content of your blog posts and pages as well as your WordPress settings, so keep in mind that any new images or plugins, or really any css or php files are not going to be backed up.

These backups can be:

• Downloaded directly from the BackupBuddy admin page
• Sent to you via email
• Uploaded directly into a specified FTP directory (BackupBuddy actually allows you to specify an FTP URL along with your FTP username, password, and upload path)

The "Backups" screen where you see all of your stored backups

Bugs I found

I did run into a couple of bugs while making my backup.

Upon completion of my first attempt to backup, I was greeted by an ominous message which read “An error occurred during backup. 0” with no further instructions (see image below). Above the red box I could see a message that read “Unable to open file for DAT:” followed by the complete path to the .zip file that BackupBuddy created.

Despite all of this, a new .zip file was showing up on my list of backups, but I was not confident enough that this backup was 100% complete in light of the error message.

The way I overcame this was by going back to the “Backups” page and repeating the process, BUT, this time, when I was taken through the steps, I opted NOT to click any of the ‘Continue’ buttons and simply waited for the process to finish on its own. This second time, I was successful, but I ended up with 2 new backups, bringing the total number of backups displayed in my admin window to 3. Kinda confusing, but I just used the most recently created .zip file and it worked fine when I imported it into my new duplicate site.

Moving on to website migration…

One of the coolest benefits of this plugin is that it allows you the flexibility to:

1. Consolidate an entire WordPress site in to a single .zip file
2. Use that .zip file to install a 100% fully-functioning identical replica of the site in its entirety to an entirely different location (ie: your development environment, your live environment, etc)

I went ahead and proceeded to copy my live website over to a testing directory which I had set up on a subdomain of my primary domain, and WOW, what a MASSIVE time savings!

Copying/moving a complete WordPress website without the assistance of this plugin is definitely do-able, but there are quite a number of steps to go through, and one mistake can really land you in hot water if you’re not careful about what you’re copying and where.

BackupBuddy removes all of the nail-biting and eyebrow-furrowing from the process by guiding you through a few simple steps.

Easy as this was for me, I would only recommend this step for WordPress users who are comfortable with WordPress installs and mucking about with plugins. For those of us who do this for a living, this is not a procedure that we could simply count on a non-technical client to handle.

The one potentially tricky part of the importing process where it asks you for your database name, database user id, and database password. I really needed to make sure that I was NOT using the same database on my testing server as I was with my live server. Otherwise, I would run the risk of having plugins, WordPress upgrades, and content that I only want on my testing site breaking my live site.

So it’s important to be conscious of which database your new site is pointing to – hence the recommendation that this process only be attempted by folks who have some experience configuring MySQL in conjunction with WordPress.

Conclusion

Despite the kinks, this plugin is a major time-saver, and potential life-saver that I will be leaning on heavily in the future, as I have no doubt that it will only improve as time goes on.

Head on over to http://pluginbuddy.com/purchase/backupbuddy to grab a copy for yourself.

So is anyone else using this plugin? What are your thoughts, experiences, etc.

Category : Blog & Cool Tools & WordPress