Backup AND Restore
Okay, I know what you're thinking.
"Not another blog about the importance of backing up!"
If you've worked in IT, then you'll understand how painful it can be having to do DR exercises. That's Disaster Recovery, to the layman. I remember at one particular company I worked for, DR exercises usually took four days. It was incredibly involved and complicated. For those in the know, terms like Data Redundancy and Role Swapping, might make you shudder at the mere mention of the terms!
Well, I discovered a slight glitch in the automated process I use for my WP site. You see, earlier today I was waxing lyrical about the importance of backups and how UpdraftPlus was a great plug-in to use.
Now, don't get me wrong! My opinion about UpdraftPlus has not changed; I still think it's great. But, tonight, when I thought I'd test the Restore functionality, I was unpleasantly surprised to see that I was getting errors when it tried to connect to DropBox!
I tried disabling the plug-in and then enabling it again, then trying the restore, but I still got the same error.
I then tried deleting the plug-in altogether and then adding it back. Nope. Same thing.
Then I found the solution. Well, perhaps not the solution, but certain a solution. Here's what I did:
- Download the backup files directly from Dropbox
- Delete the record of the backup set from the Existing Backups tab.
- Upload the downloaded backup copy to UpdraftPlus through the Existing Backups tab
That worked a treat!
Now, I know some of you are rubbing your grubby paws together with glee, thinking, "well, I use xxx plug-in for my backups and I NEVER have issues!"
I'm not denying that there are some great alternatives to UpdraftPlus. That's not the point of my blog.
The point is this: it's all very well having a great plug-in which does automated backups, but how often do you test the restore part of it?
Just saying.
Recent Comments
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Once when I was in disaster recovery for IBM we actually killed the power in a New York Data Center to see how quickly the data domains could bring up an alternative site. We were running Disney's ABC television Data Center. Those were fun days. Especially during the elections.
We have about 22 Wordpress websites and our management software backs all of them up and restores them. However on one of my portable systems I haven't had a full backup in 4 months. As a seasoned IT professional I should know better.
That's very funny. In the last few minutes I have been going through the same restore issue. Not about WP platform restore but the pages and posts. Isn't there a list of recent backups done for the posts and pages going a couple back. I lost one post and I thought I could restore it. Thanks if you know
This is a fantastic post. I had to document the DR processes that we used at my last company. Like your experiences, these occurred annually over the course of a weekend, and the manpower resources were immense, not to mention we had to have customer participation from over two dozen sites as well. Love this post, so I'll say it again. :) Thanks, Steve.
Thanks, Mel. For us, it was always four days at a remote DR site. Like you say, manpower resources were ridiculous.
Far too few members here backup regularly, and even fewer restore regularly.
We had to do DR in two days due to our uptime commitments with our clients - take any longer than that, or experience problems and we paid penalties out the yazoo. Yes, all of our DR exercises were at a remote site as well. Underground in Colorado somewhere, I think (at least the last one was).
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I do manual backups with WP Clone and the restore part is very easy. At WA it only works for restoring the exact same website on the exact same server. Elsewhere it's good for migrating sites. Full Backup With a Plugin
Thanks, Marion. I guess it's down to personal preference.