At the inaugral UK Wordcamp in Birmingham last month the subject of automated backups was raised. It came up again last night at the UK North WordPress or ‘whatever the hell we want to call it’ meetup in Leeds and so I thought I should do something about it. A Google search brought up two plugins so I decided to try them both.

The first turned out to be the backup plugin that comes with the WordPress install, WordPress Database Backup, and I found, to my suprise, that scrolling down a little bit reveals a scheduled backup option. Just what I wanted.

I’ve used this on and off (less regularly than I should) and it has always worked well, but for some reason when I tried it this morning the file that was e-mailed to me was blank.

I’m sure there is a reason for it, perhaps it is just one of those things, but if it happened once it may happen again so I opted to move on to the next option.

The second plugin is Lester Chan’s DB Manager. This plugin does more than just backups, including repairing and optimizing the database, but unfortunately the backup would not work on my setup.

WP-DB-Backup uses PHP to generate the file whereas DB Manager uses PHP functions that let it control the mysql application directly by using the passthru and system commands. In my case the necessary functions to do this have been disabled by my host for security reasons. It seems logical, although I am guessing, that most hosting companies would restrict these for shared hosting.

Although it means this plugin doesn’t work for backups (the other features still work well) in some ways I am glad that this is the case. I have almost no knowledge of the server side of things so installing a plugin that used system access, even from someone as well known as Lester Chan, gives me a few niggles at the back of my mind.

With the two obvious plugins out of contention I was left to look at other methods and I found that I already had the means to automatically backup both the files and databases.

To backup the files I turned to Cute FTP PRO my FTP client of choice. This lets me schedule a complete download of my site and to set overwrite rules so that only changed files get overwritten. This doesn’t sync the server and my local copy, files remove from the server will not be removed from the local copy, but deleting or renaming the backup every so often should resolve that easily enough. These are functions and options I had never looked into before so I am quite happy to have found them.

For the scheduled database backups I turned to MySql Administrator. This is one of the desktop tools that are produced in conjunction with MySql, part of the MySQL GUI Tools Bundle, and the tool I have used for some time in preference to PHPMyAdmin which I have always found a little painful to use.

MySql Administrator depends on your database having an external IP (some hosts will only provide an internal IP address so that it is not possible to access the database directly from a website on their own servers) but it is really easy to use and is very configurable.

I have a few sites that will require regular backup, not all WordPress based, so in some ways it is better for me to have a consistent process for them all. It also saves me installing plugins and keeping them up to date across multiple WordPress sites.

If you have a different backup setup, have found other WordPress plugins that are good then please leave a comment. I would be particularly interested in any plugins that verify changed files to do incremental backups of the actual files as well as the database.