Best Backup Practices

It’s not enough to have a backup plugin and know how to create a backup. You need to be sure the website backups will work if you need to restore it. Be prepared ahead of time if you need to restore one of your WordPress Backups you’ve created using the Total Upkeep Plugin.

Schedule WordPress Backups

You make changes on a regular basis. Therefore, you should create backups on a regular basis.

Download a WordPress Backup

A web server hack can harm your backup in the worst case. Therefore, you should download backups to your local machine after creating them.

Remote Backup Location

Along with downloading backups, you should set your backup plugin to automatically forward backups to a remote location for more redundancy if possible. Again, the goal is to ensure a complete backup of your WordPress site is available to combat malicious activity and issues with updates.

Verify Backups

It’s important to ensure your backups aren’t corrupt after downloaded. The best method is to restore the backup to another location for thorough testing. However, this is also time-consuming.

A quicker method is to verify the file checksums between the created backup file and download. If your WordPress hosting includes ssh access, you can do this on your Linux server using the SSH command md5sum path-to-file. Once you download the file, verify the checksum:

Alternatively, you can upload the backup file to Virustotal.com for the md5sum. More secure alternatives to MD5 include sha512 and sha256.

Learn more with Total Upkeep plugin FAQ’s.