Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. I’m excited to be here with you today because we’ll be talking all about Word Press and how to restore our websites from a backup. So last week we talked all about the backups and how to get them set up in four different products for different plug ins. There was four different ways that you could set up your backup. This week we’ll talk about all four of those and how we can restore those thanks to our Word Press site. So without any further ado, let’s dive right into the news.

The first piece of news I want to share with you is Word Press 4.2.2 security maintenance release came out on May 7th. That was last Thursday. So it basically addressed two security issues, and it fixed 13 bugs from 4.2. So if you haven’t updated, go ahead and do that. Most of the time if you’ve set it up right that you can have the point releases automatically update and automatically download and install on your website. So if you haven’t updated, be sure to do that. It’s a critical security release. It’s strongly encouraged to update your sites immediately. Another thing that’s out in the news – I saw this on the WPTavern.com - it is Camp Press.

It’s a two to three day social experience for geeks and creatives. So like this is an event that goes kind of along the word of Word Camp except it’s called Camp Press. So, kind of the joke is some of the Word Camps actually theme their entire work camp around camping. I know that Word Camp North Canton does a lot of that. I’ll get to that in just a second. But basically Camp Press is a two to three day social experience for geeks and to disconnect from technology and focus on community and creativity. It’s just an event that’s going to be happening later this summer. It’s put on by Go Daddy’s Word Press evangelist Mendel Kirkland.

If you’ve been to any of the bigger Word Camps, Mendel is normally there. He’s got the Go Daddy shirt on. He’s just a huge Word Press evangelist. So they are looking for – I guess they’ve got a place that they’re potentially going to use. There’s not a lot of details yet, but if you’re interested in any way, there’s a link in the article from WP Tavern where you can sign up and to get a little more information and find out where this is going to be. So that’s really cool. It’s kind of a neat way to go outside of normal Word Camp. There’s also a thing that’s called Cobapress that will be happening in Coba.

I know there’s been other people that have met in Washington for a short small master mind type session and just hanging out and getting to know each other either hacking on core or fixing things in core. It’s just kind of a really neat thing. This one sounds extremely interesting because it’s in the middle of the woods. You have no access to technology which is pretty cool. I just got back from Word Camp North Canton. I had a blast getting to hang out with Word Press people. It’s so much fun to actually go and learn Word Press yourself.

Like there was a couple of sessions that I just had some great take aways and was really excited and energized to come back and work on my plug in and fix things on my website and do things differently and just make it easier, better, and faster for everything. You know, my list of things to do came back so much longer than I’ll ever be able to obtain. But if you do have an opportunity to go to a Word Camp, I highly recommend it. Head on over to Wordcamp.org. You can find the schedule there and find out where the next closest one is. I know that I’m always scouring that page to try and figure out when is another one that I can go to.

I’m still planning on going to Word Camp Columbus this year and Word Camp Grand Rapids I think I’ll be able to get to. Hopefully, depending on when it is Word Camp Louisville. That one’s not too far from my house. So hopefully I can make it to that as well. So that was really a lot of fun. I also just as a little bit of geek news, I actually got an Apple watch right before I left. So as you may or may not know, I am a huge technology geek. I’ve loved Apple products ever since, I don’t know, a few years ago. It’s always like whenever Apple says they have something new that we need that I think that I need it. I’ll go ahead and go buy it.

So I ended up pre-ordering the Apple watch. I got it. It was cool to have for my trip to North Canton. While I was in sessions, I could see people when they were retweeting things. I could see instant notifications when I got a text message from somebody. There was a couple of times that I didn’t even feel my phone vibrate. I looked at my watch because I got the vibration on my wrist, and I knew I had an incoming notification. Another time, my phone was actually in another room, and I got the notification which was really cool. So I’ll have more details on that.

I know that I am getting push notifications when people leave comments on my websites and things like that. All are coming to my watch which is really cool. I’m still trying to tweak all the settings, but overall, I think it’s a really cool device. I’m really digging the fitness tracking aspect of it. So I’m one of those guys that just have to compete against myself every single day. So that took a little bit of time, but I just wanted to share where I was and just a little bit about the Apple watch. So I’m absolutely loving it. So let’s go into is there a plug in for this section. This one is not a practical plug in whatsoever.

It is one that I heard about at Camp North Canton. I just thought I have to talk about this one. So it is called Son of Clippie. This adds a fun animated character to your Word Press edit screens. So remember Microsoft Office starting in 1997 created this new thing called Clippie. It was a terribly annoying animated paper clip that supposedly helped you write, but more often than not it would just pop up whenever you weren’t looking for it. It would automatically start babbling about something. It actually didn’t talk; it just had like text bubbles. It was really kind of annoying.

So it is just a plug in that you can install. It actually only has 10 active installs, but I’m sure hundreds of people have downloaded it and activated it to see how it works and then turned it off. So this is just something that you can check out. I highly recommend not using it ever, but I just thought this is going to be fun way to bring in a new plug in that we probably never heard of and will never use again. So that is the plug in of the week, Son of Clippie. All right. Let’s go back into the discussion when it comes to how to restore our site from a backup. So last week we dove into episode number 231.

We talked all about how to set up our different services. There’s two services that you can use or two plug ins that you can use. You can pick one of those systems, or you can pick multiples of those. The big thing is making sure that you have a backup. Depending on how often that you goof things up, you know, you may want to have an easy to restore backup option because it is a very tedious process. Sometimes depending on the backup solution to get all of your site restored – sometimes some of these solutions that we’ll talk about today are very easy. A couple of clicks and you’re back up and running.

So today I just want to kind of highlight the four different services that we talked about last week. Remember, they were back WP up, Backup Buddy, Vault Press, and Your Web Post Backup Solution. So those are the four that we’re going to be covering. Today we’ll be doing them in reverse order of how hard they are to restore. So the first one that we’ll talk about will be the easiest, and the last one will be the hardest, in my opinion. Again, it’s best to have any of these set up. Any Word Press developer could help you get restored if you’re using the hardest solution.

Or you can go ahead and just change to another solution and go from there if you feel like you’ll need to restore backups more often. I know that as a developer or even just as myself there’s been rare times that I’ve ever actually had to restore from a backup. There were a couple of times where I had sites on a shared hosting account that got hacked. Those were really nice to backup. But that’s been about the only time. Very rarely, especially with Word Press the way it’s built in with the revisions and what not. There’s very few times that I actually have to restore a backup in order to get content back or fix my website or things like that.

So that’s just kind of another caveat that’s out there as well. So today, the first one we’ll be talking about is Vault Press. You can find out more. You can actually sign up for a 30 day free trial at vaultpress.com/tryit – T-R-Y-I-T. I think Vault Press is the easiest one. I think it’s the easiest and not really by a long shot, but it makes it so easy. Remember, I talked about how easy it was to set up. You just basically turn it on. You activate the plug in. Add your activation code. It just starts working. Well, restoring is almost as easy. It’s very, very simple when you are logged into Vault Press.

You have the ability in your settings area to add FTP and SSH details. One or the other needs to be added in order for the restore process to work properly. As long as you have those restorers, it’s virtually automatic. It works really, really well. You have two options from your main Vault Press dashboard. You can restore your website, or you can view a backup. So the restore will actually just restore the entire site from the backup snapshot that you saved. So with Vault Press, depending on your plan to either do backup once a day or once an hour, then you can pick whichever. You go to the date and pick the time.

Vault Press is really good too. It shows you what has changed. So maybe if you’ve added a new media upload, it will say that is different. If you add a new post, it will show that has made a difference. There’s another post in that category. Things like that. So you can see easily if you created a brand new post and deleted it, you can see that information in the Vault Press dashboard. So the restore will do the entire site. It will completely restore your site with one click. It will go through and make sure that everything is exactly like that backup snapshot.

The other option is called View Backup. This will allow you to pick the exact file or database table to restore. So, this one is really cool. So say you’re working on your functions.php file, and you accidentally added a closing php tag or forgot to end a bracket or something along those lines; your site is completely down because that file can’t load properly. Well, what you can do is you can back in there and navigate in through the file structure. It’s all within Vault Press. It’s all in the web interface. You can go into wp-content. Then, you can go into themes. You can go into your theme and find the functions.php file and make that simple change.

You can roll back to a previous version. Then, you click the button, and it automatically restores. So there’s no need to restore your entire website when you know the file that you’ve messed up. The same thing is true with a database entry. Maybe you’ve accidentally deleted a user name from your account or deleted something out of your database incorrectly, but you want that back. You can simply go in navigate to the time when that would be there. Then, you can go ahead and just roll back that database table. So it makes it super simple. It’s really, really easy. You can actually use the restore feature.

Restore which is a complete restore. You could actually use that feature to roll to another URL or hosting company which makes it really nice. So it’s not really advertised that much in Vault Press, but you have the ability to do that. Say you’re moving from Go Daddy over to Flywheel. You can go ahead and add the credentials in the right spot. When it restores, it’s actually going to restore on that new hosting site. One other small benefit information with Vault Press is it does not save the Word Press files. So you can’t just completely restore on Flywheel. You will actually have to install Word Press first.

As long as Word Press is installed, configured, and has a database; then it’s able to do all of its magic. So unlike Backup Buddy where it will unzip and install everything, you have to actually install Word Press first on Vault Press. So that’s one small caveat. But if you’re just looking to restore, all you have to do is click the restore button or click the individual file that you want to restore. Vault Press also has the ability to download. You can download the database tables. You can do everything within that interface as well. So you can either restore it or download it. Then, you can manually FTP it or SSH it to your server if you want.

Or you can just add the credentials, and it will automatically do that. The next one I think in way of ease is the Web Post. So I explained last week that my Web Post Flywheel actually does a daily backup. It offers one click restores for any of them by simply selecting the button and clicking restore. I mean, it’s as simple as that. There is no other granularities. So you cannot do anything but a full restore. So one thing you have to think about is kind of look at the timestamp of when that snapshot was taken. Otherwise, you may lose some of your work.

So if the snapshot was taken at 12:00 pm and you’ve done a lot of work at 3:00 pm and now it’s 6:00 pm; you may lose some content if you want to roll back from there. If that’s the case, then if you need to roll back I would probably create a snapshot of right where you are. Then, you can roll back and download and get the information that you need. So that’s not nearly as … it’s not really that … I mean, it’s useful in the fact that you have a backup that’s always working for you, but on the other hand it’s not quite as useful because your site may be changing regularly, and it’s not capturing all those different points. I could be wrong.

Flywheel actually could go in and they take those snapshots every single time there’s something changed, but I’m not that familiar with their system. So I do not know if that is the case or not. So after Vault press and Web Post, then the next backup that I think is the easiest to use is called Backup Buddy. It has the ability to do complete restores as well as restoring individual files. So let’s talk about the individual files first. Basically this works by you navigating to the file that you’d like to replace and restore the old version. You navigate right through the admin interface and just work through that. You pick the file and hit restore.

It’s as easy as that. The full backups are just a bit more complicated. I think that it’s still fairly easy to do, but you will need FTP access or SSH or some way to add files manually back to your server. So basically what you need to do is download a copy of the import buddy script and put the zip copy of your website somewhere. You can save your website as a zip file in I Themes stash. I Themes comes with the ability for you to upload your backups to an offsite server. You can upload them from your computer, or you can save them to an FTP server. So basically what you need to do is use this importbuddy.php file.

It’ll download that when you say that you’re restoring a backup. You take that file and put it on your server. Then, you put the zip file of your old website right on your server. I believe, if I’m not mistaken, you have to remove all of the content from your site. I’m not 100 percent sure if it will override things if you’re restoring a backup. I’m not exactly sure. I don’t know if you have to wipe out your site completely in order to do that or not. If somebody knows that’s listening and uses Backup Buddy a lot, please let us know by putting a comment in the show notes for episode number 232.

So let’s say, for example, you do have to remove all of the contents from your hosting site. You basically wipe out everything, then you upload this zip file and this import buddy php file. So then you would navigate to your Website.com/importbuddy.php. Then, it’s going to start walking you through some steps. So the first one is basically setting this all up. We’ve done step one. Step two is actually all the files will unzip. Then, step three, you’ll set the site URL different to your database for your database credentials. So you put in the different user name and password for your database to get that all set up.

Then, step four is the database will upload and get all set up and configured. Step five will be updating the URL. So this is kind of how it works if you are moving your site from one place to another. If you are moving it from point A to point B and change URLs, it would automatically update those URLs as part of that. I guess you put that information in when you’re adding the database credentials. Then, you also put in the site URL. That will all be set up. The last step is it will actually clean up and remove any unused files. So it just pretty much wipes away anything that’s unnecessary. It cleans things up, and your site is ready to go.

So if you’re moving from yoursiteA.com to yoursiteB.com, this is the perfect way to do it. You basically zip up that backup. You put the zip file in the import buddy over on your new site. You put that over there at siteB.com. Then from there, you go to the import buddy script. Run that, and it unzips everything. It decompresses it and sets up the database and does all of those pieces. It just works marvelously. It’s been a little while since I’ve done that, but it does work very well. I believe I really enjoy the user interface of Backup Buddy. It does a remarkable job stepping you through what’s going on.

It shows you the steps that are taking place all that the same time. I just really overall like the experience. So it’s probably worth just the ease and the ability to move and transfer all this data … it makes very well worth the price of the plug in itself. Then the last option is Back WP up. I’ll get that out. How that works is basically you will download your entire zip file of your website. So when you’re setting Back WP up, you can do the entire content of your website. So basically what you do is go in and it will create a zip file. You can download that to your computer.

Then, you take that zip file and upload that to your media host whether that be through FTP or using FileZilla or something like that. You will upload those to the same path as where your website is … where you want that to be. Then what you’ll do is extract that file once it’s on the server. So the easiest way to do that is to go into your C panel and go into file manager. From file manager click on the backup file zip drive and click extract. Then, it will go ahead and extract all of the information in the right place. You basically tell it in the extract folder where to put everything.

Then, your site will be up and running in just a few minutes. You will have to restore the database once all of your data is there. Then, the database will be in the root of your website. Once that’s unzipped, you can upload that to phpmyadmin. So as you can see it’s a little bit more tedious and a little bit more troublesome to get a backup from Back WP up, but it is absolutely possible. You can absolutely get things restored and won’t take much time at all. The longest time it will take especially for using the Back WP up solution, the last one we talked about, is it will take a while for you to upload your entire website to your server depending on how big your website is.

That’s one of the cool things about how I like I Themes in the Backup Buddy solution that has the stash which is really nice because you can actually save a backup copy of your website to your I Theme stash. Once it’s in the I Theme stash, then it automatically transfers things from the I Theme stash to your server. It’s done much more quickly. It’s not depending on how fast your Internet connection is at your house or your Wi-Fi or wherever you may be working on your website. So that’s one of the limitations of using Back WP up. It does take a little bit to restore and to have that zip file and put them onto the cloud.

So that’s kind of how the four different pieces work. So you can see the first two are pretty easy and just click a button inside a web interfacing and it kind of does its thing. Backup Buddy makes it a little bit more intense because you have to download all the stuff or put all your downloads somewhere. Then, you manually have to use the import buddy script and put that on your server. So you have to do that via FTP. FTP is the most likely answer for that. Then from there once it’s uploaded from FTP, then you can start running and unzipping the files and doing all that kind of stuff.

Then the last one, Back WP up, you actually have to do quite a bit of … you have to download all your files. You have to upload them all. Then, you have to unzip them. Once unzipped, then you have to take the database file. The easiest way to do this would be to take the database file and download that from your server. Then, upload that to your phpmyadmin and import that and get it all set up and running. I know that Back WP up does have a paid version, but I’m not exactly sure how that works because I’ve never played with the paid version. I’ve tried these other three versions. Those all seem to work very well.

I’ve just never explored the paid version of Back WP up. So that will wrap up this week’s episode. Hopefully, this never happens to you, and you never have to restore from a backup. But it’s always best practice to have some sort of backup. If you ever need help, you know, please let me know. I’ll be happy to recommend a developer that can help you get things back up and running if you’re not comfortable with using FTP or SSH or editing to database or things like that. So if you want a free trial of Vault Press, head on over to vaultpress.com/tryit. We’ll talk again next week. Take care. Bye-bye.