{"id":138812,"date":"2015-03-19T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/premium.wpmudev.org\/blog\/?p=138812"},"modified":"2015-10-07T21:02:03","modified_gmt":"2015-10-08T01:02:03","slug":"backup-and-restoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/backup-and-restoring\/","title":{"rendered":"Backup Plugins Aren’t About Backing up, They’re About Restoring"},"content":{"rendered":"

Backing your site up is essential, but being able to easily restore it is even more important.<\/h2>\n

Anyone who’s ever had to restore their site after server problems or a security breach will now that in those vital moments (or if you’re unlucky, hours), you’re just not thinking straight.<\/p>\n

The last\u00a0time I had to restore my site was while I was on\u00a0a camping holiday. My site had been hacked and I had to find somewhere with wifi and restore a clean backup fast. I offloaded\u00a0the kids onto my husband and sped off in search of the nearest coffee shop, where I was able to access my backup and restore it as quickly as the slow wifi would allow.<\/p>\n

The previous time was when my hosting provider lost all my data while\u00a0moving their servers (yes, really!). That was some years ago, when I had all my clients’ email accounts stored on my hosting account and was using a plugin that emailed me a backup of the database and uploads folder\u00a0for each site on a regular basis. My first priority was to get everyone’s email up and running again, then to reinstate all my clients’ sites (merging databases and files), and then finally to get my own site online. I was using a free plugin that didn’t make it easy for me to restore my sites and it took weeks before everything was in full working order again. I effectively went out of business for the\u00a0entire time.<\/p>\n

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But why am I sharing\u00a0my tales of woe with you? Well, I want to impress upon you how important\u00a0it is that whatever backup option you choose, you make ease and speed of restoring your site the most important criteria when you’re deciding what service\u00a0or plugin you’ll use. The first time I had to restore\u00a0my sites it took weeks and cost me hundreds of pounds in lost earnings. The second time it took me half an hour and cost nothing.<\/p>\n

The difference between these two scenarios was that in the intervening time I invested time and money in creating a more robust setup. I migrated all my client sites to Multisite, moved email to Google apps and paid for the Snapshot<\/a> plugin, which gives\u00a0me a one-click restore option.<\/p>\n

In this post I hope to convince you that making a similar investment of money and\/or time will save you much more time and money in the long run, and help you sleep easy at night. First I’ll take a look at what you should look for when choosing a backup plugin.<\/p>\n

Why Easy\u00a0Restoring\u00a0is the Most Important Criteria When Choosing a Backup Plugin<\/h3>\n

A short while back I wrote a review of the top backup plugins<\/a>, looking at how easy they were to configure and use to keep your site backed up.<\/p>\n

In that review I rated the plugins based on a few key criteria:<\/h4>\n