We’ve Got One Less Problem With Automatic Backups To Cloud
One of the worst nightmares of website owners is waking up one day and finding out that the website they have worked so hard to build is gone; it might be something like a blank white page or a 404 not found error. It is even worse if it’s an e-commerce website. Just imagine how much loss in sales it would have cost, plus the loss of consumer trust. There are many reasons a website might just suddenly disappear: an update which caused conflicts, server error, or in worst case scenarios, it might have been hacked.
This is why having daily backups is an important part of maintaining a site. A full backup of the site and the database backups should always be ready in case anything happens to the site that might cause malfunctions. We at Portal Integrators make sure that this is always a part of our Best Practices Checklist when developing and maintaining sites for our clients.
The only problem with having daily backups is that it takes up a lot of your site’s storage space if that is where you are saving your backups. Especially with large scale websites with only a standard storage size, it would only take a matter of days for the storage size warning to appear. We have had this issue before when we have to go through the backups daily and remove backups that are already months old just to free up space. And if you are maintaining your own site, managing your backups daily can be quite a tedious task.
We are lucky, though, that we are now in a generation where almost everything can be stored in the cloud automatically. If your site is on WordPress, it is even easier to set up automatic backups to the cloud with the help of plugins, so your backups can be uploaded to the cloud server without much effort.
We have used two backup plugins so far in our the sites that we are maintaining: BackupBuddy and BackWPUp. BackupBuddy is a paid plugin developed by iThemes, while BackWPUp is developed by Inpsyde GmbH. BackWPUp has a free and pro version.
These two plugins both have automatic daily backup features and an automatic storing of these backups to cloud services such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. The cloud service that we are subscribed to is Dropbox, and that is where we send our daily backups to. We also have the option to have either a full backup of the site (full WordPress installation and database) or just a database backup. Setting up the automatic sending of backups to the cloud services is also easy with these two plugins. You just need to authorize Dropbox, or the cloud service you are going to use, within the plugins and when the connection is successful between the two, you will now be able to store the backups automatically to the cloud.
This feature is most helpful especially for busy people who do not have much time to check daily if the backups are being created and if the site storage is full because of it. We can go about our business and have some peace of mind knowing that our site has backups in any case that something happens to it. I’m going to quote Ariana Grande here, we’ve got “one less problem” with these backup plugins.
Backups Are Your Bestfriend
Backups are one of the most important part of maintaining a website. In cases wherein the site goes down, you can count on backups to save the day.
Backups Can Be Done Automatically
Having daily backups is a must when you have a WordPress site, but when done manually, it can be quite tedious. Thankfully, there are plugins which can do this task automatically and on a daily basis.
Cloud Storage and Backups Are A Perfect Pair
Daily backups, however, can take up a lot of storage space in your WordPress Installation. This is why having a cloud storage service is just as important. With this, the backups can be stored directly to the cloud storage, and would not fill up your site’s space anymore.