Hi, guys, I’m Vivek from wpw3schools.com today, we’re going to see how you can take a backup of your website. Okay, so first let’s see.
Table of Contents
What is the backup?
So Backup simply means saving a copy of your website on a particular date and then keeping it safe after you take a backup, let’s say you keep making changes to your site and one day your site suddenly stops working What do you do in this situation? How do you recover your site? If you already have done the backup then you just have to restore that backup and your site will be working again. Now after this, your site will look exactly as it was when taking the backup. So we highly recommend that you always take a backup of your site. So that you never lose your work Okay guys, so this is how backup works. Okay, so I’m telling you all the things in a step by step process.
What we have to do :
Okay. So let’s get started First let’s see how our site looks like Okay, so this is the site that I’ve built on WordPress.
Let’s Start :
Now, if you want to back up the site you need to do three things. The first thing is to install the backup plug-in on your site.
Step 1 :
Installing the Plugin :
So to install the plug-in, Let’s go to our dashboard And then go to plugins and click ‘add new’. Now search for a plugin called updraft And you’ll get this plugin now.
This is the plugin that we’re going to use for backup, Install the plugin. Let’s click install And activate And you can see here that the plugin has been installed. So once the plug-in is installed we can now take the backup.
Step 2 :
Go to plugin settings :
So to take backup click settings And then click backup now.
Step 3 :
Now make sure all of these are selected and click backup That’s it we have now taken a backup.
Step 4 :
If we go to this tab here, You can see the back up which we just took. So this is how you can take a backup of your website.
Step 5 :
Now, how do you use this backup?
Okay, so there are two situations where you might need to use your backup, Let’s take the first situation.
Situation 1 :
Let’s say by mistake you change something on your site and you want to go back then You can use your backup to go back to a previous time. So let’s try it out. I’m going to go into pages And let’s say I delete the homepage. Now if I go to the site and click refresh You can see that our homepage is gone.
Now if you want to destroy the homepage, all you have to do is go to updraft click restore And select the backup, which you want to restore Now choose all the options here And click restore to restore your site.
Now if we go to our site and click refresh You can see that we have got our home page again. So this is how you can use the backup to restore your site. So now you cannot always remember to take a backup every time.
Benefits :
So let’s say you take a backup today and after two weeks of working on a site your website crashes You will lose all of the changes which were made during those two weeks. So to avoid this we can set up a schedule which will take a backup of a site at regular intervals By doing this our site’s content will always be backed up without having to backup manually. So let’s go to the second part of this tutorial.
Step 6 :
Where you can see how to set up an automatic backup?
So to set up automatic backup, let’s click settings under updraft, and then let’s go to the Settings tab. So here we need to choose how often do you want to take the backup.
So I recommend you choose weekly in both of these places Then set the other option to four. Now, this setting will take one backup every week and it’ll keep that backup for four weeks. So this means you will always have the backup for the last four weeks.
Step 7 :
Okay So next we need to choose where we want to store our backups. So updraft gives you different places, where you can store your backup. I’m going to choose Google Drive as my storage And then scroll down and click Save.
Step 8 :
As soon as you click save updraft will ask you to link your Google account. So that it can store the backups there, So to link it, let’s click here.
And it’ll ask you to sign in to your Google account, so we’ll click here Now Google will ask for your confirmation. So let’s click allow And it will take you to this page. So now let’s click complete to finish the linking And now Google Drive account will be linked to updraft Means all your backups will be safely saved to your Google Drive So the automatic backup setup is now complete And you can see that the first backup will be taken on this date.
So if we go to this page here Over time we will get more and more backups which are the backups for the last four weeks. So now our site will be backed up automatically and it’s safe from crashes.
Now after we have these backups what if our site crashes like this? and when we try to reach the admin area What if we are not able to access it?
Step 9 :
So next. Let’s see how we can use our backups to recover a crash site. So in order to recover a crash site, we need to do three things that are :
1. To remove the old WordPress installation which has now crashed.
2. We need to make a fresh WordPress installation on the same domain.
3. We can restore the website using the files we have in our Google Drive.
1. To remove the old WordPress installation which has now crashed :
So, to recover our crash site we are first going to remove the current WordPress installation Okay, so to remove it, let’s go to our web host So I have my hosting with GoDaddy, so I’m just going to go there And then click sign Now in order to remove WordPress, I’m gonna click manage all And then click these three dots and click remove.
Now go ready we’ll ask you to confirm So I’m gonna type reset And click remove And the crashed WordPress site will be removed.Now once the old site has been removed we can now restore our site. So let’s go to step two of recovering a crashed website.
2. We need to make a fresh WordPress installation on the same domain :
Now the second step is to reinstall WordPress on the same domain. So to install a fresh wordpress site, let’s click Add site, and let’s quickly go through the setup process which will install wordpress. So we’ll click get started.
Then to choose your domain Click Next And then again next. Now keep username and password for the new WordPress site and click Installed.
Okay, so now a new WordPress site will be installed on your domain. So once it’s done we can click get started And then skip this by clicking ‘No thanks’ and okay So you can see that we are now back on our WordPress dashboard and WordPress is now working on wpw3schools.com.Before we are not able to access the site but now we have a working WordPress dashboard.
3. We can restore the website using the files we have in our Google Drive :
Now before we restore our files from the backup, let’s see how the site looks now. So to see the site let’s go here and click Visit site and you can see that we have the default WordPress site. So now it’s time to restore our files from the backup. So to restore the files, we need to install the updraft plugin on this new WordPress site. So to install updraft let’s go to our dashboard then go to plugins and click add new.
Now search for updraft again And click install and activate. Okay, so now the plug-in has been installed on our new website now to restore our site let’s go to settings And now if we go to existing backups You can see that there are no backups here.
Step 10 :
Now, how can we fix this?
Because we installed updraft on a new WordPress site. It is no longer linked to our Google account. So to help the plugin find the backups. We need to link it to the same Google Drive account, which we used before. So to link the Google Drive account, let’s go to settings And then choose Google Drive And then scroll down And click Save. Now when you click save like we saw before the plugin will ask you to link your Google Drive account.
So let’s click this link And choose a Google account and click to allow. Now to complete the linking let’s click here And Google Drive is now successfully linked to the plugin. Let’s check the backups. So let’s go to existing backups and now if we click rescan remote storage You can see that we have got the backup which was stored in our Google Drive Now to restore our site all we have to do is click the store Select all the items here and click restore. That’s it our website should now be restored. so check it let’s go to a site that is here And you can see that this was a default site that was there before now if we click refresh You can see that site is restored with the same content.
The verdict?
Okay, so everything is done so that’s it guys This is how we can take a backup of your site and then restore it when you need it. Now you know in WordPress you get frequent updates for your plugins and themes and there is always a chance of breaking your site when applying an update. Now if you want updraft to automatically take a backup before updating any plugin or theme You can get the premium auto-backup feature. So I hope this article helped.
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