backing up the site

[Anastasia Connor]

Good afternoon,

Thanks for all your previous help. I was wondering whether you could recommend any plugins or other ways to back up our site?

Thank you!

Anastasia x

[Bill Robbins]

Good Morning,

There are a few different options for you. For paid solutions, some people like the VaultPress that’s built into the Jetpack plugin. It’s a subscription option and is very easy to use.

I’ve used BackupBuddy as well. It’s a very good plugin with quite a few different options for where to store the backups. I generally used its integration with Amazon’s S3 service to keep my backups.

WP Backup to Dropbox (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-backup-to-dropbox/) is also a good plugin. What’s “missing” in a sense from this one is a simple way to restore a site. BackupBuddy has an import tool as does VaultPress. Backup to Dropbox requires a more manual approach. It’s not impossible at all, but is not as smooth as the others.

I switched to WP Engine web hosting in part because they provide automated daily backups. You can also create new backups on demand in about 5 seconds. That makes backing up before things like updates trivially easy.

Whatever method you choose, having a backup is a fantastic idea. They have saved me many times.

Take care,
Bill

[Anastasia Connor]

Hi Bill,

Hope you had a nice weekend. I’ve installed Backup Buddy but it turned out that my host (Namesco) has HTTP Lookback connections disabled which means I can’t use it. I’ve emailed them to ask what else can be done but not sure whether it’s best to try another option.
Also, not sure whether it’s related or not, but I’ve now lost navigation menu links to both the Events page and a WooCommerce product. Do you know what the issue might be?

Thank you!

Anastasia x

[Bill Robbins]

Good Morning Anastasia,

I don’t know much about the inner workings of the various backup plugins to tell which ones use loopback connections and which ones don’t. Besides Backup Buddy, I’ve also used WP Backup to Dropbox. VaultPress also has many people who like its service.

The first thing I would check with the menu items is are the links going to the correct page. Go to the navigation builder (Appearance > Menus in your dashboard) and remove the two items that are coming up missing. Then add them again from the content on the left hand side and save your menu. Check and see if they are going working now.

If they aren’t the next thing I would check on are WordPress’ permalinks. Here’s how to do that:

1. Go to the Settings section in your WordPress control panel and click on Permalinks.
2. Scroll down to the bottom and click update. That will save your permalinks again and clear out the permalink cache.
3. Check your missing page and see if it’s visible again. If it’s not, go back to permalinks and choose the default option. Then check the missing page again.

Let me know how it goes,
Bill

[Author]

Posts