On today's episode, we are going to continue to talk about the systems that you need in place besides just having a website, and today we'll talk about backups right here on Your Website Engineer podcast, Episode No. 376.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and I'm excited to be here with you today because we're going to be talking about backups, and it's one of my favorite things to talk about. Not really, but I really enjoy talking about backups and making sure that your site is protected, and making sure that you do not have any – there's no reason that you should lose any content on your website. So we'll talk about that in just a couple minutes.

I do have to apologize about last week's episode. If you downloaded the episode right away, you may have noticed that it was the same version of 374, as the week before. And so if that happened I was able to fix it quite – quite quickly, but it was just one of those things. I was copying and pasting and adding the URLs for different things and I accidently copied the episode link for 374 instead of 375. So if you got that duplicate episode then just go ahead and delete the second 374 and then you can re-download and you then can listen to 375 where we talked all about why you need an email list and how you can get an email list up and running.

So today I've got a couple announcements here. I've got three announcements that I want to share with you, and then I have a plugin to share. So let's go ahead and dive into the announcements. Last week we talked about WordPress, the 4.9.3, and then immediately after – I mean, almost hours later, after I had recorded the podcast, WordPress 4.9.4 was released. And this was a maintenance release that fixed a severe bug in 4.9.3 which caused sites that support automatic background updates to fall – to fail automatically.

And so it was most likely if you automatic updates set up then it didn't update from 3. – or it didn't update to 4.9.3 and so they needed a 4.9.4 to automatically update all of the WordPress websites. So that is one of the pieces of news in the past week. And the other thing that I want to share with you this week, and there's only gonna be show notes for Episode No. 376, and it is a free, virtual WordPress JavaScript conference happening on June 29th. This is by Zac Gordon. He's the one that launched the Gutenberg Development Course a few weeks ago. And then he's got a virtual class. I'm talking about teaching JavaScript for WordPress. And then this conference will take place on June 29th.

It is something that he's still working on to make sure that there's enough sponsors to cover the event so it can be completely free. There have been 15 confirmed speakers and more is going to be announced soon. So it's almost like a WordCamp, but it is a virtual online thing. And we've seen a few of these around the US and some of the people in WordPress space have been organizing a 48-hour WordPress-athon or different things like that. So this is something that you mark your calendars with because there are a lot of cool things going on with JavaScript, and by this time the Gutenberg editor will be out and will be running WordPress 5.0 and whatnot. So if you're interested in learning more about JavaScript, I'd recommend checking out the link in the Show Notes and finding out more about this and putting it on your calendar so you do not forget.

And the other thing that I want to talk about, and this is something that's more a regional announcement, is we are still looking for speakers for WordCamp Dayton. It is going to be on May 18th and 19th, and it will be happening right in the downtown Dayton area, in the Metro Library. It is going to be a really awesome event. It's going to be so much fun. And we're just looking for people that are interested in speaking, whether it is if you've never spoken before, you can go ahead and sign up. And we're looking for speakers of all experience levels and all knowledge levels, because even if you know very little about WordPress, but you have some other cool thing that integrates with WordPress like that is a great topic for a WordCamp. So there's only kind of show notes for that as well. Or you could head on over to 2018.dayton.wordcamp.com.

Lastly today, I want to talk about a plugin. And the plugin is called a 404 to Start. And this is a – this is a plugin that you can install that doesn't go to your template page for your 404 page. So how WordPress works is if somebody goes to your URL like yourwebsite.com\1234 and there's not a plugin or there's not a page at 1234, it's going to redirect you to this static 404 page. And it's really not the – it's just kind of like oops, you found the wrong page, or whatever that theme's designed to say. But the 404 to Start, this basically will just redirect people to a start page or a home page or any page on your site that you like. And so it just gives you a little bit more functionality that you don't have to go in a tweak a theme to redirect somebody to a page.

Maybe you create a 404 page inside your WordPress pages, and then you can navigate people right there if they come across this type of link. So that is 404 to Start. It's got 60,000 active installs, so it's quite a popular plugin. And it's one that I wanted to highlight today in the "Is there a plugin for that?" section.

All right. Today, let's go ahead and continue talking about the different systems. I originally thought I was going to talk about different services that you have to pay for. And while there are some services you can pay for backups, there are also plugins that you can pay like a one-time fee per year. And so this whole month we're just gonna talk about things that you need in addition to your website. You know, this one probably should have been the first episode that I talked about last week, but I went with newsletters. All four of these this month are something that's very, very important that you need to have in addition to your website.

We get a lot of people coming to WooCommerce support, and this is really surprising to me that they come to WooCommerce support and they are making thousands of dollars every day with their WordPress website running WooCommerce, but they do not have a backup. And they have no – it's just it blows my mind because as soon as a website goes down or crashes or breaks, like now you've lost all the orders; you've lost all the transaction details, especially if it was a subscription site. And then you have to go and ask for all the people to re-signup again. I mean, it's very, very inconvenient and can cost you a lot of money if you do not have a backup and a backup doesn't work properly.

So what I want to talk about is good backups and how to get a backup started. And then I got four different ways that you can create a backup for your website. Then just a good backup solution is something – it has to fulfill two things. And that is they are stored in one – more than one location and they are created on a regular basis. And this goes true with your computer and, of course, with all your photos and everything else. Like it's really nice to have a duplicate copy. But one of those copies needs to be located somewhere that's not your house. So if somebody comes into your home and steals your computer and your hard drive like now you've lost both of your backups.

And if your house is destroyed by a fire or it's flooded or anything like that, if all of your backups are in that one area then you're gonna lose them. So that's something you want to think about. You want to make sure that they are created regularly, so you don't have to say oh, when was my last backup? Oh, it was a year ago. Like that's not gonna be super helpful. And they're stored in more than one location. So those are some two things and that means that you've got a very good backup solution. And if you wanna have them in more than one location, so maybe you want to have them both stored on – I guess, well I'll talk through right now what my backup strategy is, and then we'll dive into the different – four different areas.

So I use VaultPress. VaultPress is a service. It's being wrapped in with Jetpack and Jetpack Professional plans now, but it is a service that backs up my website every hour. And it serves – and it stores all that content on Jetpack server. So that's something that I don't even have to think about. It's over there in Jetpack land and it is just automatically backed up.

Then I also have a version of my website running locally on my computer. And so I have a – it's not quite a – I don't – I guess, I don't make sure that it is an exact duplicate all the time. It's usually about a month or so behind. And so I should do a little bit better of a job of making sure that my website is always up-to-date. But, for the most part, it's fairly close. And then I keep that stored on my computer and I keep that version that's stored on my computer also stored on Dropbox. So I essentially do have three versions on my website that aren't the live versions.

So I've got the live version that's hosted on Pressable. I have the VaultPress version which is backed up offsite. And then I have my computer version. And then I have the Dropbox version which is a copy of – the copy of the version that's on my computer. So I essentially have my website in four places. So I'm not as concerned if my local environment isn't up-to-date 100 percent of the time because I know that I also have VaultPress which is all the time up-to-date.

So let's dive. Let's talk about the first thing you -want to do. You could backup with a plugin, so that's the first way that you can create a backup. That backup can be done with a multitude of different plugins that are out there. There's BackupBuddy. That's one of the big ones that are out there. That runs you about $80 per year. It goes up based on how many sites that you have. There is BackWPup. It is a free plugin in the WordPress repository. BackWPup is a little bit more cumbersome to restore, and one of those things is it just really depends on how much you're willing to invest in the restoration process.

Like the next one that I'll talk about is VaultPress. Like VaultPress has a one-click, or there's a couple clicks, I guess, to restore your website as long as you've entered your FTP credentials and you've added your server information. You could say I want to restore back to last Tuesday's website. Click a button and then a few hours later it's restored to last Tuesday. VaultPress also does a really great job if you're moving a website from one server to another. Like I did this when I moved from Flywheel to Pressable; I click a button and I said here's my credentials from Pressable and here's my old credentials from Flywheel and then I went ahead and clicked a button. I ended up going to the gym, and by the time I was to the gym like the entire site was transferred and duplicated onto another place.

So that's what VaultPress does. VaultPress is the one plugin that I really like because it does – it just changes – or it only – it only backs up the changes to your website. With all these other ones, with BackWPup, with BackupBuddy – UpdraftPlus is another one that's really good, but it takes a – it basically, every time it runs it has to search your entire site. It does everything that's on your website and then saves that as a snapshot. With VaultPress, it goes ahead and it says oh, these are the only six things that have changed since the last time I backed up; I'm only -going to backup those things. And so the backup process is a lot quicker. It's a lot speedier, and it doesn't take up a lot of server time to run those.

So those are the four plugins that I wanna highlight: BackWPup, BackupBuddy, UpdraftPlus, and VaultPress. And the UpdraftPlus, there is a free and a premium version. And then VaultPress that is included with JetPack Professional and Jetpack Pro plans, or Premium plans. And so there is some cost involved with those. If BackupBuddy – like I said, there is some costs. So I do recommend investing a little bit of money if you have to, to get things set up with a backup, with a plugin.

Most of these two have the ability to backup to different locations. You can backup to Amazon S3. You can backup to Dropbox. You can send all your stuff to an email file if you wanted to, like it gives you the ability to put your information somewhere else. You do not want to backup and then store your backup file on the same server as your website because if that crashes then you don't have access to that. If your website crashes then most likely your backup stuff is crashed as well, or you can't get to it, you can't access it. And so then you can't even restore. You couldn't move your website to another place. So that's kind of a big pain. So you want to make sure of that.

Another just a security thing with storing your backup file on the same host as your website is somebody can actually go in and they can navigate and they can find in the Uploads folder where those snapshots are. And if they can download them via – somehow get into your site and download them, now they've got your database and your database contains all your passwords, so then they can log in and they can do some really nasty things to your website. So you want to make sure that your backups are not stored on the same server as your website.

So that's backing up with a plugin. Another way that you could have a backup system in place is you can backup with your host. And most WordPress hosts do this. Not all of them. You'd have to double check and make sure that they do, but a lot of websites, or a lot of website hosting companies, will take a snapshot of your website every single day. And they'll just take one snapshot throughout the day and then you have those restore points that you can use to get your website back up and running if anything were to happen.

Now, again, this is something that you can use as like one of those fallback strategies. Like I wouldn't necessarily have this as our first line of defense, like oh yeah, my host has that all taken care of. Like I want to have that as a backup to my backup because sometimes systems happen and glitches happen and sometimes they may not have been backing up your site. You have no – unless you login regularly, you have no idea if it's actually taking place; if those – if your site is actually getting backup. Or if it is, they're saying that they're backing up and then all of a sudden you go to do a restore and they're like oh, well we haven't backed up for like three weeks. And then that's a really big deal, too.

So you can use this as a secondary backup system, but it is something that you definitely want to make sure that is running if you want that extra, extra little – ease of mind, if you will. So that's another way. You can backup with your host. You can just have your host back it up. The third way is you can backup manually. This is something that I do not recommend because you will never remember to do it. Or you'll not remember to do it regularly, so you have to set a to-do list item maybe the first of the month, maybe the last of the month, whatever. You back up your wp-content folder, you export your database, and then you go save it somewhere.

And this, like I said, it is something that you can do. It is not something that I recommend because of the fact that it could be a very tedious process. You may forget. You're like oh, I'll get to that next week. You defer it and you defer it then all of a sudden you have a big catastrophe and you need to get your site back and you haven't restored and you haven't – you set up the – you haven't done that process in a few weeks. And so you can really lose a lot of data.

The whole thing is like when you're thinking about a setup, a backup setup strategy, you want to think about how much data am I willing to lose. And what's the minimum amount of data that I'm willing to use? So for an example, like if I didn't have VaultPress which is backing up my site every hour on the hour from now until infinity, like I used to have a – I used to have BackupBuddy set up to back up. It was like, I don't know, 6:00, 7:00 in the morning on Wednesdays, because my post would come out on Wednesday mornings and that was the only time I was really publishing content to yourwebsiteengineer.com. And so I wanted to make sure as soon as I posted something that that information was saved and recorded.

I probably – I believe or I remember correctly like I was creating those posts on Tuesday sometime or early in the morning on Wednesday. And then sometime in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, I was creating that backup. So even though the post was in draft status, like if I had to restore then I can just change the Draft status to Publish status and then I'd be all good. So if you're only publishing once per week then maybe you only have to run a full website backup once per week. If you're publishing every single day, maybe you do it every other day. And it's all about like how much data are you willing to lose.

Another thing that I do is with all of these show notes that I've created, I'm just using the Apple Notes app. And so like all of the text, if I ever needed to get it back, is located in Apple Notes. So I could go and I could create a new post and I could say okay, Episode No. 376, the title is You Need a Backup System. And then I copy and paste all the data that I have in Apple Notes. And so I've got just an extra layer of protection there. So if all four of my backups crash and I have to get back my website, I at least have all the show notes that I could duplicate onto a website again, so I don't have a bunch of blank pages within a website. So that's another thing to think about. So that's – we've talked about manually. We're not gonna do that. It's just an option that's out there, but it is something to think about.

The fourth option is have a backup by developing locally. And this is one that you can use, MAMP. There's DesktopServer. There is Local by Flywheel. There's Vagrant or VVV. There's a ton of different options that are out there. And this is a way that you can get a clone of your website up and running. You can do work on it locally. You can take your website with you, so you can work offline. And it just gives you really a lot of flexibility to develop. And then, again, it's an extra backup system. I used this with WP Migrate DB Pro. And this is a way that on my local computer, on my laptop, I can pull in any changes that I've made to my database or so if I've added any new posts or pages or recategorized things or whatever changes I've made on my live site, I just pull all of that data into my local environment so that I have a local updated copy of everything that I'm doing.

And so that's kind of how that works. That's how I keep that updated version. Again, like I said at the top of the show, I need to spend a little bit more time and at least once per month pull in all that data so I have the last four months – or the four weeks' worth of posts that have went out on yourwebsiteengineer.com. So that's just another way that you can backup locally. You could set up those directories, like I have, to backup your theme files and your plugin files and all your uploads for your website.

You set that up so they're all in Dropbox, and then you've got the power of Dropbox and their synching platform with Dropbox. Or if you need to make changes, you can go to another computer or you can upload things via the web, like they've got a lot of possibilities if you need to get data back. So I'm very comfortable with my backup solution, with what my whole setup is. And I guess I – the fifth one that I didn't really even think about, or fifth and sixth one, it's I have my computer set to backup as well. And so I've got Backblaze, which backs up all my files to the cloud. And then I have Time Machine which is – Time Machine is backed up to my computers at my house. All of those are backed up to Time Machine as well.

So anything that's living on my computer is backed up on Backblaze. It's backed up in Time Machine. It's backed up on Dropbox because the files are in Dropbox. And then I've got VaultPress and then I've got – so I've got lots of copies. A very, very big catastrophe is going to have to happen for the Your Website Engineer website to be completely dismantled and me not to be able to restore that at any single point.

So that's what I want to share with you today. Make sure you have something in place and make sure that it's backing up regularly. And every once in a while, like maybe once a year or once every six months, you want to make sure that you can restore your website. And it's as easy as just creating a brand new site using a different domain name and then trying to instore – or, instore; restore and import all of your contents there just to make sure that that process works and it's backing up correctly.

You may -want to – a lot of these plugins you can set them up to say, to send you an email if they fail. If something happens and your backup isn't created for a certain reason then you get a failed notification which is really, really nice. So that's what I want to share with you; make sure that you've got this all set up. And this is a system, a must-have system, if you're gonna run a website, you need to have. This is just as important as having a host to run your website. It's important to have a place that's always – or you wanna have a way that's always backing up your WordPress site.

So that's what I want to share with you this week. Next week, I've got another great system that we need to implement along with our WordPress website to keep us up and running. So until then, take care, and we'll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.