WPCD has always had a backup process for your WordPress site. However, while the current backup process is easy to use, that ease of use brings some limitations:
- It only sends data to Amazon S3
- The scheduling is fixed and
- Multiple remote targets and accounts are not supported.
For the vast majority of our users, this is all that’s needed. And most admins will complement our backup process with a backup plugin to ensure that they had two independent backups at all times.
But, some power users and admins want more. So, to introduce additional advanced features without adding complexity to what most users need, we created a new backup script that will be available in a forthcoming version of WPCD.
New Features
This new backup script has a ton of new features:
- It is based upon the well-known and well-supported rclone project.
- It introduces support for many popular remote targets such as Backblaze B2, DigitalOcean spaces, Dropbox and more. In fact it has 30+ separate remote targets! You can view a list of all the remote targets that are supported on the rclone site here.
- It includes the option to backup separate components – database, files, nginx configuration or all items.
- You can setup multiple cron/automatic schedules for each or all components. This means you can do things like schedule database backups each hour and file backups once per day.
- You can choose to do differential (incremental) backups for files.
- Bare-metal restores and downloads from remote locations are now easier.
- You can send files generated from each backup iteration to multiple remote locations.
- You can exclude files by size and by path to avoid backing up extra-large files and unnecessary paths.
This new backup script effectively takes the rclone utility and wraps it up with a bunch of WPCD WordPress-specific smarts.
V2 Limitations
Because of the extensive feature set and the wide range of remote targets, it would take us 4-8 weeks to write a robust UI for it. So, we’re limiting the formal initial release to a command-line only option. Since only advanced users are likely to want all these functions, we’re not expecting this limitation to be a big issue.
And, even though it’s a command-line function, it is menu-driven:
This makes it easy to launch and use – even if you’re not fully comfortable working on the command line.
Wrap Up
Most users will end up using our current backup process – that’s not going away. It’s simple and straight-forward and good enough for most use cases. But, for admins who require more flexibility, this new enhanced backup script will be there when you need it.
Was This Article Useful? Or do you have questions or comments about it (or our products & services)? We'd love to hear from you!
Automatic Notification Of New Articles
Sign up to get automatic notifications of new articles. This is a different list than our standard list - you only get new articles once a week (usually on Mondays). No other emails will be sent unless you sign up for our general list as well.
Follow us on Twitter! We post a lot of cool things there first. To keep up, click the "X" below!