How To Back Up A Website

Posted on April 3, 2009 by LJ Earnest
Categories: Software,Techniques

Fridays are tip days at SimpleProductivity blog.

One of the things that has always made me paranoid about blogging is losing the work I’ve done. I have a plugin that automates the database backups, but what about the site and all the customizations I’ve done? The same thing for websites that I write and manage. If a client calls me with an urgent need while I am away from my home computer, I will make the change and hopefully remember to bring the change down into my “source” when I get home.

I had been doing manual FTP downloads of the websites, but this can be very slow, and it also relies on my memory to remember to do it. Consequently, it rarely got done.

I decided, during the recent round of implementing new backups, that I needed to find a way to automate the backup of my websites. This is how I have set it up:

The Software

I was happy to find that the software I had chosen for my computer backups, SyncBack (see Changing Up Backups…And Why You Should Have Good Backups), was recommended by the WordPress folks for backing up the blogs. The question was, How? I was unable to find an intuitive way by playing with the interface. I could send backups to a website via FTP, but it didn’t seem to be the other way around. Luckily, the SyncBack help files provided the answer.

Setting Up A Website Backup Using SyncBack

Click on any image to enlarge it.

Create a new backup job and name it.
Switch to expert mode. Click the expert mode button on the bottom of the screen.
Set the “source”. The source, in this case, is where you will store the backup of your website. Select the directory using the buttons at the top of the screen.
Set the “destination”. The destination is your website. Click on the FTP tab and enter the information for your website.
Set up the advanced options. From the advanced tab, choose “Destination overwrites source always (restore)”, “Delete file from source” in the “what to do if the file is in the source but not the destination” box and “Copy file to source” in the “what to do if the file is in the destination but not the source” box.
Set up filters. Set up your filters to exclude files you don’t need (statistics, etc).
Set up email notification. Set the email notification to let you know how it went.
Test and schedule. Test the backup and schedule it.

Syncback has really made backing up my blog quite easy. Since it does a compare of the files, it doesn’t take very long. With the scheduling, it takes it out of my memory, and the email notifies me if something went wrong.