WordPress Backup Plugin That Works

When I began using WordPress I had had several years of experience in using Drupal and other CMS packages. I was used to using phpMyAdmin to make backups so I didn’t give much thought to installing a backup plugin with WordPress.  After blogging for some time I realized that I wasn’t talking the time to make backups of my WordPress installations. It made sense that I needed to do something that would give my regular backups of WordPress or one day I would probably lose my Blogs. This was the beginning of a 2 week search to find the right WordPress backup Plugin.

 

The first plugin that I tried was wp Time Machine. Time Machine promises to create a backup of your WordPress installation, files and database. You can either make manual backups or you can use a Cronjob to create an automatic backup and have it sent to your Dropbox or Amazon S3 account. This Plugin had received a lot of downloads in the year and a half since it was released. I was able to get Time Machine to create backups that I could download. I was not able to get it to move a backup to my Dropbox. The Cron report sent to my email reported that Time Machine was calling a file in my root directory even though my blog was set up in a sub-directory named “blog”. After trying several things to fix it and get it going I gave up on Time Machine.

 

Next I tried a plugin called “WordPress Backup to Dropbox”. This plugin’s claim to fame is that it is very simple to set up and use. I found the Plugin to be very simple to install and set up. It did make automatic backups at time intervals without having to set up a Cronjob in the hosting cPanel. The backups were transported to my Dropbox. The trouble is that the backup consisted of many individual files instead of a .zip or .tar file. This is not very appealing to me. I prefer to have my download in one easy archive file. I move on from WordPress Backup To Dropbox.

 

The plugin that I chose is called XCloner – Backup and Restore. XCloner is software which has been used to backup Joomla CMS and it has been adapted to be used in various types of websites including WordPress. XCloner is powerful, effective and works well. XCloner creates backups, which include the files, a database backup and the XCloner.php restore script.  The plugin offers help in setting up Cronjobs by suggesting the exact cron command. Database backups can be configured to include or exclude Drop Tables. Folders within WordPress can be excluded so that you can save your theme and data files only. A number of other useful features are offered in this package so that your backup will be to your liking. The best thing is that XCloner creates backups are moved to your Amazon S3 account without a hitch. I really like the XCloner plugin. After a reasonable installation and setup period I was able to get scheduled backups to load to my Amazon S3 storage account. I am really pleased with the usefulness of XCloner. Now I can virtually forget my WordPress Blog, as far as backing up in concerned. And if my Hosting Company crashes or goes out of business I have a useable backup in my Cloud account so that I can restore it. Visit the XCloner website here: XCloner.com.