Having used wordpress for a number of years now, one of the things that can be a pain is backing up your site. We have tried a number of options, some successful and some not so much. Of course when you back up a wordpress site you need to both backup the raw files and images as well as the database. There are a number of wordpress database tools for both backup and things like optimising your database. Once such plugin is WP-DBManager. We have used this with great success and has a number of features. But this obviously only gives you an SQL backup file and does not help if you need to fully restore a site.
We used to use the excellent iDrive to wordpress plugin, which unfortunately has been discontinued. We think it has something to do with iDrive’s new product iDrive Sync. We think it might be re-released to work with the iDrive sync package. This backed up all files including the database to your iDrive within a folder that you specified. We have now started using a reasonably new plugin called Wordpress backup to dropbox.
This latest version uses the dropbox App folder and you can backup a number of wordpress sites to a single dropbox account. This works well and again does backup all raw files and the SQL database. It can be scheduled to backup daily, weekly etc and stored in a specified folder. It has a few paid premium extensions like the Zip backup which will compress the backup before sending it to dropbox. We really like it, as you can have the dropbox app on your desktop machine and always have a local copy of your website without having to do anything. One quirky thing which we have yet to find out why, is that if you set it to backup a fresh site and then log out of wordpress it can take sometimes days to complete. And these aren’t big websites, some around 50MB etc. It seems to be much quicker if you set the first backup on a fresh site and leave the browser open and logged in. Very strange. Anyway if you don’t like plugins you could always manually backup using FTP for your RAW files and then something like PHPmyAdmin to backup your wordpress database. Hope this helps someone when considering how to backup your wordpress site.