Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. Again, like the announcer said today we’re going to be talking about backups and how we can backup our site. We’ll get to that in just a few minutes. I have a couple of announcements for you real quick. I’ve got a plug in to share with you. So let’s dive right into the announcements. This weekend is Word Camp North Canton. If you live in the Northeastern part of Ohio or in the Pennsylvania area or anywhere within a few hours’ drive of North Canton, Ohio; I would highly recommend checking out this event.

I will be there speaking. I have a speaking spot on Saturday morning talking about how to use Word Press and how to create a podcast. So we’ll be diving into that. Word Camps are just so much fun to meet people, other Word Press users. It’s a great way if you’re a developer to meet clients. If you are a client, you can meet developers. You can just overall meet people in the community that have a passion about Word Press. I’m really excited about this one. It’s been a little over a month or so since Word Camp Dayton happened. I love going to other Word Camps because they’re not nearly as much work for me that is for sure.

I get to go and hang out. I get to speak. I will be there on Friday and Saturday. Look for me I will probably be wearing some type of orange. If you are coming to the event, make sure you come up and say hi to me. I’ve met a ton of people at Word Camp North Canton. I’m just excited to connect and spend time with each one of you this weekend as well. Another thing I want to share is last Friday we did a custom post type webinar. It went over really well even though I tried to jam four hours’ worth of content into one one hour webinar. So the webinar replay is up. You can get to it in the webinar replay section of the website.

Or you can use the link that is in the show notes for episode number 231. It goes in and really explains … I take some time to just talk about what custom post types are and how to use them. I did some visual examples. I even showed one that I had coded into yourwebsiteengineer.com right before the webinar started just to kind of highlight and give me some extra value and extra benefit for making my site easier to update and maintain. That’s what the real purpose of custom post sites are. It’s all about making it much easier to go in and make those updates. So you don’t procrastinate forever to do them. Oh, I have to do this.

Copy all this HTML, then change things. It’s just a big pain. You work it in to custom post sites and it makes it much simpler to get your content published and put out on the web. That’s the second announcement. The third one is one that came from a news article over on wptavern.com. It’s how to restore the link title attribute removed from Word Press 4.2. So this was one of the things that happened with the newest version of Word Press. It basically took out the title field of a link when you created a link. When you highlight some text and want to create a link, then it gave you a box to add the title. It was just a title attribute of a link.

Honestly, Drew James who was the guy who led Word Press 4.2 development cycle explained why it was made. He said the title field was intentionally removed from the module because it was often confused with the actual link text itself. In recent years, we began to actively discourage the use of title attributes in links as they are largely useless outside of providing the hover tool tip that many visual users enjoy. Most importantly, they don’t promote good accessibility. If you’d like to continue using title attributes, you can actually use them manually using the text mode in the editor.

So basically, they’ve removed that because it doesn’t add to accessibility. It’s more for the hover over tip tool like if somebody would hover over a link, then it would explain more information. I can see where this makes a lot of sense and why it would be a good thing to actually remove. So if you highlight some text and click the link button, that text that you highlighted is actually in the box. It’s called link text. So you can change that. You can modify it if you want once you’ve added the length in there. But if you really are interested, I guess, in keeping the title box, you could actually add a plug in. It’s in the article that I’ve linked in the show notes.

It’s called restore link title field plug in. It is developed by Samuel Wood and Sergio Beracove. I’m sure I pronounced that wrong, but those two guys went ahead and did that. It’s been activate on more than 100 sites. So it’s basically just adding back old functionality which isn’t always a good thing. Word Press is doing something. This core development cycle was actually doing this for a reason. It makes a lot of sense why they got rid of it. But if you really need that for whatever your purpose is for your website, go ahead and add this plug in back in there. All right. The next thing I want to share is all about the plug in of the week.

This one is called Download attachments. This allows you to easily add and display download links for any posts or page. How this one works is really kind of cool. You really have to just go over to the Word Press Repository and search for download attachments. Basically, you can add in all of this information about how you want your attachments to appear and how they can be downloaded and whatnot. Then, you can put them at the bottom of the post or the bottom of the page or different things. Then, it shows little icons next to it based on the type of file that it is. So if it’s a zip file, it’s got a little zip icon.

If it’s a pdf, it’s got a pdf icon. So on and so forth. If it’s got an image, it’s got an image and stuff like that. So it makes it really kind of cool. It makes it easy. You don’t have to go in and find an image to put next to the link to have that little graphical thing. It basically does a lot of things. It counts how many times people download it. You can drag and drop the files and put them in different orders. It’s based on media library attachments. It’s a really cool plug in. It looks really cool. It was recently updated. It’s got over 3,000 active installs.

So if you need some sort of functionality like this for your website, I would highly recommend going and checking out the plug in in the repository called Download attachments. Of course, there’s a link in the show notes for episode number 231. Okay. Today I want to talk about eh four different options for backing up your website. You’ve heard me say this a lot. Every time a new version of Word Press comes out … every time there’s different things, make a backup and do whatever. So when a new version of Word Press comes out, you make a backup. Then, you update.

If you install a new theme like if you make a backup of your old theme and then you go. That’s the whole purpose, but have you really ever thought about how hard it is to restore one of your backups from your website? So this kind of question/ topic came to me this week as a friend of mine was wondering how to make a restore of one of his previous backups. I thought about it. I was like, wow, it’s not really that intuitive to make sure that to restore a backup. IT’s just kind of a big pain. So the big deal is making sure that you are backing up so that you have that copy.

Depending on your comfort level or your ability for you to handle everything yourself, you may not be using the correct backup option for you. So what I wanted to do today is go through some of the different options. There’s two free and two paid options to backup your website. Take a look at those and some of the pros and the cons of all of them. You can see, okay, which of these solutions is going to be best for me if I want to restore my website. Next week, we’ll talk all about the restore; but this week we’re just going to focus on making sure that we have the correct solution.

Of course, if you’ve already been backing up your website and you maybe have chosen the wrong one or the one that’s not the best for you, that’s okay. You can always add another one. You can turn the one off and start backing up to the other using another service or another plug in. So just remember about that as well. So that’s kind of the overarching thought process behind why I picked this episode and why we’re going to be talking about backups. Next week, I really want to dive in to say how we can restore our website from some sort of catastrophe and get it back from a backup.

So it will make more sense next week once we know these are our four options and how to restore from those different options. So the four options are you can use a plug in free website and two plug ins that are very popular. There is Back WP Up is a free plug in in the repository that also has a paid upgrade version. There is Backup Buddy by I Themes. So those are the two plug ins that we’ll be talking about. So our free plug in and a premium plug in. Then, we’ll be talking about two services. One of those services is Vault Press. That’s actually kind of a plug in, but it also has its own service.

Then, we’ll also talk about Your Web Host. Sometimes Web Hosts have a backup solution. Because my backup solution through Flywheel is, you know, they have it and they back it up. We’ll talk about that in just a little bit. So I want to do a little compare and contrast between the differences between Back WP Up and Backup Buddy. Those are the two plug ins that most people use or a lot of people use. Then, we’ll go in and look at the options between Vault Press and using your own host to backup your website. Sound good? All right. Let’s go ahead and get rolling. So the very first thing if you want to spend absolutely zero money.

You want to get it up and running. Back WP Up is going to be the option for you. You can go ahead and find it in the Word Press Repository and just set it up. Now, it is a little bit tedious to set up. There’s quite a few steps to make sure that everything gets set up properly. But once you have it set up, then what you can do is automatically start receiving … you can schedule and get your backups going. So you always have the content. Or you can install Backup Buddy. Get the license or purchase from Backup Buddy. It starts at, I believe, $50.00 or $80.00. Something along those lines. You can go ahead and get started right from there.

Once you have Backup Buddy installed – two sites for $80.00. 10 sites for $100.00 or unlimited sites for $150.00 through Backup Buddy. So you install a plug in. You configure it, and you get up and running. Okay. So let’s take a look at the pluses and minuses of Back WP Up and Backup Buddy. So both of these plug ins will do full site backups and database backups. I mean that’s pretty much the big thing. We want to make sure that we’re backing up both our content for our sites and our database. So those are awesome. Both of those do that. Backup Buddy has storage space for backup.

So you can just automatically upload it to their servers. They can store a copy of your website for you which is really, really nice. You have the ability with both of these platforms to save to Dropbox. Both to save to Amazon S3. Both save to somewhere on your server via FTP. They both can save to Rack space. Both plug ins can send you email notifications when things are good, whether you had an error, or whether the backup has been working properly and successfully completed. One of the features that Back WP Up does is it sends differential changes only which is really nice.

So when you do a backup, it doesn’t have to backup all your files every single time like Backup Buddy does. It goes through and uploads everything, your database and everything. Whereas with Back WP Up, it only does incremental changes. Both plug ins have the ability to do automatic and scheduled backups. So you can say I want it to go off at 3:00 am every day or 3:00 am once a week or whatever that is. So those are just some basic backup features. So that’s the most important part. You’re getting a plug in to have the backup features that you need. Then, when you come to restore features, Back WP Up out of the box isn’t very easy to restore. We’ll talk about that next week.

Whereas Backup Buddy has a lot easier ways to restore your website. You can restore. You can migrate. You can even see a history of changes. You can restore individual files. So you’ve got a lot more flexibility when it comes to restoring your website when it comes to Backup Buddies. So keep that in mind. Neither of these plug ins can do security or malware scans. So they can’t go through and make sure that there’s no problems on your site. You need to make sure that there’s no malicious code or anything. So neither of those can do that. Backup Buddy and Back WP Up can do database repair and optimization.

Only with Backup Buddy you can do database text replace. So if you wanted to replace all your text from one URL to another URL, with Backup Buddy you can do that. Or if you want to change one word to another word, you can do that within Backup Buddy itself. So those are kind of the differences between the two. Both of them do very much the same thing. They have a lot of the very same backup features. Back WP Up will not have as many options when it comes to places to save your storage areas or to save your files. But Backup Buddy has a little bit more flexibility. Backup Buddy has much better restore ability for your website.

So if something does go wrong, you can easily more quickly restore without having to hire a developer or get a developer in there to help you kind of muddle through which is the correct backup and things like that. So that’s something to think about as well. So those are the two plug ins. There’s tons of other plug ins that are out there that will backup, but these are kind of the two very popular ones that you’d want to consider and take a look at to run on your website. The next service that we want to look at is called Vault Press. Vault Press is a plug in that is created by the folks over at Automatic. There is a team all behind Vault Press.

I think six or eight of them that dedicate their lives’ work to making sure that you never lose any content on your website. If you need to restore things, you can get them restored quickly and easily. So the comparison, we’ll just do a comparison between Vault Press and the two plug ins themselves. Vault Press starts at $5.00 per month and has a few more tiers depending on how often you want to backup. If you’re a light user and you just want to backup once a day, it’s $5.00 per month. It’s an absolute steal. If you’re interested in even trying this out, you can go ahead and use the link vaultpress.com/tryit. T-R-Y-I-T.

That will give you one month for free. You can download the plug in. You can install the API key, and you can get up and running for one month. You can try it out. You can see how easy it is to restore. Try out all the features and see if you like it or not. So the differences between Vault Press and the plug ins is basically they do the same thing. They do full site backups. They do database backups. They provide the storage space. That’s the only thing that Vault Press does. It can only provide servers on the wordpress.com servers for your backup. You can’t send your backup to other places.

You can’t send it to Dropbox or S3 or anything along those lines. It does do the incremental backups or the differential backups. So it only updates and makes changes and saves changes when you make a change whether that be a database change or some sort of change to your theme file. So that’s nice. It has scheduled and automatic. You basically turn on the plug in, and it just starts backing up immediately. It does real time backup. So it can do hourly backups. It can do things in real time. So if you are actually changing things on your site as it’s backing up, it will go ahead and make those changes as well.

It’ll see those changes and do that. It’s very easy to restore using Vault Press. You can see a whole history of your changes. You also have the ability to migrate your site using Vault Press which is pretty nice. Vault Press also has built in security or malware scanning. So that means that you can actually … it will run and see this file doesn’t match the file that’s in the Word Press depository. There’s probably a problem. There may be malicious code or something like that. You want to check into that and make sure that … it basically does all that for you. It will send you an email when it notices something that’s not right.

You can go ahead and address it and get it fixed on your website. So I really like that. When it comes to the other features, you cannot do any database repair or optimization with Vault Press. It’s kind of right out of the box. That’s all you can really do with it. It backs up your site. It stores to wordpress.com servers. If you ever need help, they have engineers that work around the clock to help you to get things updated, restored, and things like that. The one limitation on Vault Press is that the Word Press core files aren’t backed up. I mean, it would be kind of silly to have hundreds of thousands of sites backup the same Word Press core files every single time.

It knows what version of Word Press that you’re on. Then, it doesn’t actually update or backup those files. So what that means is you can’t do a complete restore from a backup. What you have to do if you ever need to backup is wipe out your site completely. Start with a brand new fresh installation of Word Press; then you can go ahead and use Vault Press and just restore all of your content from there. So that’s the only limitation. You can’t really just package it up, here’s a bundle, and I’m going to put it on my computer and unzip it all. You have to install Word Press first.

Then, you can do things from there. You also can migrate, like I said earlier. So if you wanted to move it from one server to another, you can use the migrate system within Vault Press which is pretty nice. So that’s another option as well. So that is the third option. So we have two plug ins. We have one service. The last service that we’ll talk about is the services that are sometimes included with your web host. So some web hosts, especially the ones that are Word Press dedicated ones like Flywheel – Flywheel is the one that I use a lot. I mean, that’s my main hosting company. They do a daily backup for you.

So the backup runs every night, and it’s stored for 30 days. I can create a snapshot whenever I want. So if I wanted to make sure that I snapped an image like I want to make all these changes and make sure I have a really good backup, I can go ahead and snap the changes right there. So I click a button, and it automatically does a backup right from that particular point. Then, you can do one click restores. So if you need to restore a file, you just click on it and it automatically does its thing to move the file from wherever it saved it as a backup and move it onto your live server. So that’s pretty nice. You have no need to use a backup plug in.

So they claim that backup plug ins are clunky and take up space. There is some benefit to not having a plug in to have it automatically do it on the system. So that’s something that you may want to look into as well. So this is a free version. It’s run just like that. You don’t even have to set it up. Depending on your host, you’d have to check. You want to make sure you’re doing it right … you’re backing up properly. I know Blue Host does a nightly backup, I think, of your core files. But I don’t know how often they backup your database files.

That’s where it’s really important to have our database files because that’s all of our content and things along those lines. So currently, my backup solution is I’m using the web host. I use that free service within Flywheel. They’ll go ahead and backup my site. But then, I’m also using Vault Press. I’m doing that because I want to make sure that I’m using what the company has. I want to just make sure that I understand the process and how to use it. I did a Vault Press rotation a few months’ back as part of my happiness engineer. I rotated over to Vault Press for three months.

It was really eye opening to see all the people that were so thankful when we were able to restore things and just to understand how all the systems and pieces work. That was what I needed to install it for. So I installed it on all my sites and all my sites run with Vault Press. It’s really nice that Vault Press, Akismet, and Jetpack are kind of bundled together. It kind of makes a real cohesive experience. Now if you’re not up for paying for a monthly subscription, then one of the other options is probably right for you. I will say though, even though Backup Buddy is $80.00 a year, there is an annual renewal fee. So it’s $80.00 per year. You’re still “paying for a service”, but you may not be paying on a monthly basis. So that is kind of what I wanted to share today. So two plug in options: Back WP Up or Back WP Up Pro. Pro doesn’t give you many more options except for a few more backup options. The Backup Buddy by I Themes. That one is the $80.00 a year for their plug in. You can restore to your website much much easier. There’s Vault Press that you can go over to vaultpress.com/tryit. You can give that a whirl for 30 days. Or if your web host has the option. Sometimes you can have them do all the backups for you and not worry about a backup plug in.

So that’s what I wanted to share with you today. I want to give a quick thank you to those who are using my affiliate links on my resources page. All of those items there are things that I actually use, trust, and absolutely love the products. So I make a small commission off of those links. So if you want some way to give back … if you are ever interested in some sort of Word Press service, head on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com/resources and look at whatever I may have recommended for domain names or hosting or things like that. You can go ahead and just use the link.

It’s not going to cost you anymore. Sometimes you actually get a better bargain by using one of my links. This week, I want to talk about Backup Buddy. I have a lot of people that use the link for setting up Backup Buddy and using it. It’s one of those plug ins that on most of my sites I have. I don’t have it on mywebsiteengineer.com because I’ve got two different plug ins running, the Vault Press and on the live server with Flywheel. It’s one of those plug ins that always gets installed on client sites. It always gets set up because there are so many options to backup.

It makes it so easy to deploy your website from a local environment to a main environment out on your web host. You can find and replace inside your database. You can repair common issues with your database. You can move it from one place to another. There are so many things that you can do with Backup Buddy. I’m just scratching the surface. If you’re interested, go on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com/BackupBuddy to learn more. With that, let’s wrap up this show. All right. That’s going to wrap up this episode. Thanks for tuning in this week. Next week, we’ll be diving into how to restore from a backup.

This happens a lot, you know, more often than not we don’t need the backup. It’s just nice to have those extra copies laying around. But sometimes you may need to restore from a backup. So we’ll be talking about that in next week’s episode. Until then, we’ll talk again then. Take care. Bye-bye.