Backing up your WordPress site is one of those essential things that don’t get spoken about nearly as often as they should. We’ve already reviewed the best WordPress online backup tool, BackupBuddy, and today we are going to talk about another tool which allows you to backup your site to your local computer. This piece of software is Backup Smart. We actually use both BackupBuddy and Backup-Smart concurrently on our sites, in order to have two backups at two separate locations and better peace of mind.
All you need to do is enter the login details of your site, and schedule your backups. Then Backup Smart will automatically login to your site’s CPanel and start downloading a copy of all your files and databases. It’s a really useful tool that can be essential for cases when a hacker has attacked your site and destroyed some files, or some hosting mishap in which you lose your site’s files.
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7 Responses
Never did and never will trust third party backup tools, especially ones that don’t run directly on your server, like the two you have mentioned — one relies on a WordPress install, the other one on CPanel.
It’s not difficult to do your own backups. You need mysqldump, tar/gz, sync or scp and a cron schedule. If you’re running a VPS you can also ask your hosting provider for regular full system snapshots, which come at a lower level and usually with a price tag.
Another newer option is to use InfiniteWP.com as a backup system.
Yes Konstantin, in theory I agree with you, however many people do not find it easy to do their own backups, hence the reason for these tools. Maybe you would like to write a guest post on how to do backups with the setup you mention, I’m sure many would find it useful.
We have tested it for backing up our custom huge WP framework and it works in an amazing way. The only issue was migrating the .htaccess (since we use static paths out there which are broken during the transfer, but it is not their fault).
@lincoln – nah, importing manually is equal to suicide, too much details missing and there are lots of hardcoded static URLs.
@Jean, I know you are part of their affiliate program (which is OK), but for the sake of the users I would point you to this AWESOME service (still free) that does everything with just a few clicks – https://wpmayor.com/link/managewp/ . It will become paid eventually, but I needed only 5mins to replace BackupBuddy with it.
Thanks for pointing out Managewp.com, it is a great service especially for those who have multiple websites to manage, I will probably be reviewing it in the coming months. I haven’t however managed to backup sites with it, apparently there are still some problems especially when backing up bigger sites. I imagine it will be solved soon though. It’s always good to have alternatives one can use.
Couldn’t a similar solution be done by exporting the SQL alongside with FTPing your entire website over to another one?
For that type of solution I recommend BackupBuddy