Site Backups

This guide aims to help you set up automated daily site backups. Site backups are full backups of your site files (media, themes, and plugins) and database.

Storage Settings

Before you can enable site backups, you must configure a cloud storage provider where your backup files will be stored. Navigate to the Backups tab under a site and click Add Storage Provider.

SpinupWP supports a number of cloud storage services. To quickly get started with your preferred storage provider, please follow one of the following guides:

Once you’ve created your provider, enter the bucket name and region where you would like backups to be stored. The bucket must already exist on your chosen storage provider before entering it on SpinupWP.

Site Backups

Backups are carried out in a rolling fashion. Meaning, that servers with multiple sites that have backups scheduled at the same time will only carry out one site backup at a time. This is to prevent overloading your server’s system resources.

Backup Settings

The Backup Settings tab allows you to configure what to back up and when backups should run for this site.

Backup Settings

You may also elect a retention period (in days), which is the length of time to keep backups on your chosen storage provider. When a backup is older than the retention period, it will be removed.

Database Backups

With database backups turned on, your database will be exported as an SQL file, gzipped, and saved to your storage provider in the following location:

{BUCKET}/{DOMAIN}/{DATE-DATABASE_NAME}.sql.gz

File Backups

With file backups turned on, all files and folders within the site’s root folder will be balled up into an archive file (tar) and compressed (gzip).

{BUCKET}/{DOMAIN}/{DATE}-files.tar.gz

Paths to Exclude

There may be files or folders that you do not wish to include in your file backups. For example, if you’re using WP Offload Media to offload your Media Library to Amazon S3 and have versioning enabled on your bucket (a combination we highly recommend), there’s really no reason to include those files in your daily backups. In this case, excluding your uploads folder may make sense:

/files/wp-content/uploads

Similarly, if you’re using Composer to manage PHP dependencies, it’s likely that you don’t want to include the root vendor directory in your backups.

/files/vendor

It’s also possible to exclude certain file types. For example, MP4 video files:

*.mp4

The following paths are automatically excluded from all backups:

/sites/{DOMAIN}/.ansible
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.bash_history
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.bare_repo
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.bash_logout
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.bashrc
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.cache
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.cloud-locale-test.skip
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.composer
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.gnupg
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.local
/sites/{DOMAIN}/logs
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.profile
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.repo
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.selected_editor
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.spinupwp-pool.conf
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.ssh
/sites/{DOMAIN}/.wp-cli

Paths which you manually exclude will be appended to this list.

Schedule Daily Backups

With this setting turned on, a daily backup will automatically be scheduled to run at the selected hour. SpinupWP will use the server’s timezone to schedule the backup.

If you configure multiple site backups on a server to run on the same hour, they will run one after the other, not simultaneously.

Delete Old Backups

Toggle this option on to define the number of days automatically remove backups.

On-Demand Backup

There may be times when you wish to trigger a backup instantly. This is useful if you’re making changes to your site and wish to take a snapshot before deploying any changes. You can perform an on-demand backup at any time. Navigate to the backups tab on the site screen and click Backup Now.

Backup Listing

The backup listing is retrieved from your storage provider each time you load the backups screen, so you can be sure it is an up-to-date, accurate listing of your backups. It displays the date and time, who initiated the backup, the size of the site files backup, and the size of the database backup.

You can also easily distinguish a site backup by adding a note to it. To add a note, click in the “Notes” column of a backup in the backups table. If there’s already a note, you can edit it by clicking on it. If you choose to create a backup when restoring a database, a note of “Prior to restoring backup from {{ date of backup being restored }}” will be added to the backup automatically. Similarly, if you choose to create a backup when updating WordPress core, plugins, and/or themes, a note of “Prior to updating WordPress core, themes, and plugins” will be added automatically. You can edit these notes as you like.

Click on the icons in the Database, File and Actions columns to download the database backup, download the site files backup, restore the site backup to the current site or delete the backup.

Full Server Backups

SpinupWP doesn’t provide full server backups or snapshots (as they’re also known). We believe that these types of backups are best performed by your server provider (Vultr, AWS, etc). Full server backups can be enabled when provisioning a new server in SpinupWP (for supported providers). Alternatively, they can be enabled via your server provider’s control panel at any time.

Full server backups