What is the backup?
Backup simply means saving a copy of your website on a particular date and then keeping it safe after you take a backup, let's say you keep making changes to your site and one day your site suddenly stops working What do you do in this situation? How do you recover your site? If you have a backup you just have to restore that backup and your site will be working again Now after you restore the backup your site will look exactly as it was when taking the backup So we highly recommend that you always take a backup of your site so that you never lose your work, so this is how backup works. Okay.
Let's get started
First let's see how our site looks like, so this is the site which I've built on WordPress Now if you want to back up the site you need to do three things
1. install the backup plug-in on your site.
to install the plug-in.
2. Go to your dashboard And then
3. go to plugins and click add new
4. search for a plug-in called updraft And
5. click install And activate
And you can see that the plug-in has been installed
So once the plug-in is installed we can now take the backup
How to take a backup?
1. click settings And then click backup now
2. Now make sure all of these are selected and click backup
That's it we have now taken a backup
So this is how you can take a backup of your website
how do you use this backup?
Okay, so there are two situations where you might need to use your backup
First situation Let's say by mistake you change something on your site and you want to go back You can use your backup to go back to a previous time
try it out.
go into pages And let's say you delete the homepage Now if you go to the site and click refresh You can see that your homepage is gone now if you want to destroy the homepage, all you have to do is go to updraft click restore And select the backup, which you want to restore Now choose all the options here And click restore to restore your site Now if you go to your site and click refresh You can see that you have got your all pages again
So this is how you can use the backup to restore your site So now you cannot always remember to take a backup every time So let's say you take a backup today and after two weeks of working on a site your website crashes You will lose all of the changes which was made during those two weeks So to avoid this we can set up a schedule which will take a backup of a site at regular intervals By doing this our sites content will always be backed up without having to backup manually.
How to make Backups Automatic?
So to set up automatic backup,
1. click settings under updraft And then
2. go to the Settings tab So here we need to choose how often do you want to take the backup So I recommend you choose weekly in both of these places
3. Then set this option to four and four
Now this setting will take one backup every week and it'll keep that backup for four weeks So this means you will always have the backup for the last four weeks.
4. You need to choose where you want to store your backups So app draft gives you different places where you can store your backup.
5. After choosing place scroll down and click Save 6. link your Google account so that it can store the backups there So to link it, let's click here And it'll ask you to sign into your Google account, Now Google will ask for your confirmation.
7. click allow And it will take you to this page so now let's click complete to finish the linking And now Google Drive account will be linked to updraft Means all your backups will be safely saved to your Google Drive So the automatic backup setup is now complete And you can see that the first backup will be taken on this date So if we go to this page here Over time we will get more and more backups which are the backups for the last four weeks
So now our site will be backed up automatically and it's safe from crashes Now after we have these backups what if our site crashes like this? and when we try to reach the admin area What if we are not able to access it? So next.
How to recover a crashed website from backup?
So in order to recover a crash site we need to do three things
1. we need to remove the old WordPress installation which has now crashed and then 2. We need to make a fresh WordPress installation on the same domain
Then finally we can restore the website using the files we have in our Google Drive So to recover our crash site we are first going to remove the current WordPress installation
How to remove the old WordPress installation?
so to remove it, let's go to our web host So if I have my hosting with GoDaddy, so I'm just going to go there And then
1. click sign Now in order to remove WordPress,
2. click manage all And then
3. click three dots and
4. click remove
Now go ready we'll ask you to confirm So I'm gonna type reset And click remove And the crashed WordPress site will be removed Now once the old site has been removed we can now restore our site So let's go to step two of recovering a crashed website, which is to reinstall WordPress on the same domain
How to install a fresh WordPress site?
1. click Add site And let's quickly go through the setup process which will install WordPress so we'll
2. click get started And then
3. choose your domain
4. Click Next And then again next
5. keep a username and password for the new WordPress site and
6. click Installed Okay,
so now a new WordPress site will be installed on your domain so once it's done we can click get started And then skip this by clicking 'No thanks' and okay So you can see that we are now back on our WordPress dashboard and WordPress is now working well, Before we are not able to access the site but now we have a working WordPress dashboard Now before we restore our files from the backup, let's see how the site looks now so to see the site let's go here and click Visit site And you can see that we have the default WordPress site So now it's time to restore our files from the backup
How to restore your files from backup?
So to restore the files, we need to install the updraft plugin on this new WordPress site So to install updraft let's go to our dashboard You and then go to plugins and click add new Now search for updraft again And click install and activate Okay, so now the plug-in has been installed on our new website now to restore our site let's go to settings And now if we go to existing backups You can see that there are no backups here Now, how can we fix this? Because we installed updraft on a new WordPress site. It is no longer linked to our Google account. So to help the plugin find the backups. We need to link it to the same Google Drive account, which we used before So to link the Google Drive account, let's go to settings And then choose Google Drive And then scroll down And click Save Now when you click save like we saw before the plugin will ask you to link your Google Drive account So let's click this link And choose a Google account And click allow Now to complete the linking let's click here And Google Drive is now successfully linked to the plugin Let's check the backups. So let's go to existing backups And now if we click rescan remote storage You can see that we have got the backup which was stored in our Google Drive Now to restore our site all we have to do is click the store Select all the items here and click restore That's it our website should now be restored so check it let's go to a site which is here And you can see that this was a default site which was there before now if we click refresh You can see that a sight is restored with the same content you Okay, so everything is done so
This is how we can take a backup of your site and then restore it when you need it Now you know in WordPress you get frequent updates for your plugins and themes And there is always a chance of breaking your sight when applying an update Now if you want updraft to automatically take a backup before updating any plug-in or theme You can get the premium auto backup feature by clicking this link
So I hope this article helped you Thanks for Reading.
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