Episode 179: How Good Are Your WordPress Backups?

Show Summary

Rob Cairns talks about how good are your WordPress Backups.

Show Highlights:

1. Do you test your backups?
2. Your backup is only as good as your ability to restore.
3. How I do backups.

Show Notes

Hey, everybody, Rob here again, in today’s quick tip podcast, I really want to talk about website backups. And we all take them, those of us who are at least smart, I offer care plans to my clients where I do backups at both the the host level and they do backups as well, at the website level, and the website level use a plugin, typically their Backup Buddy or Updraft Plus depending on the website. And that’s all fine and dandy. We’ve got backups. The question is, do these backups actually work? Have you bothered on a regular basis to check if they’re working? And by checking I don’t mean, oh, the log said the backup completed. Frankly, that’s not good enough. What you need to do is do what many big companies do. And that’s called the disaster recovery test. So let me give you an example of that. I had a good friend of mine who work for the Bank of Montreal in it. And every so often, they did a disaster recovery test. It was actually regulatory reasons. And what they did in those tests was proved the ability to restore after a disaster. So how do you do this? On your website, you create a subdomain or a or even more so a test domain and try and restore your backup to that domain. Yes, the pointers weren’t, won’t all be correct. Possibly, depending on the solution you use, I often test with a migration solution to make sure they are working. And I do that religiously and every three or four months, and it checks to make sure I have the ability to Restore a Backup and buy a migration solution. What I mean is UpdraftPlus has a migrator that you can buy. Backup Buddy has their import buddy which enables you to import your website to another domain, it changes all the URLs for you. And the reason that is so crucial is it proves my backups can be moved around can be imported elsewhere can be set to go. And it checks the validity of those backups. So the moral of the story in today’s quick tip is check your backups. Check them twice, make sure you can restore the backup. And if you’re not doing that, frankly, your backups are potentially useless. And you need to protect your business. And if you need to reach out, feel free to reach out to me. Anytime I’d be glad to set you up with a plan and help you out with that. Let’s test those backups to make sure they work. Thanks for listening everybody.

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