In this guide we are going to walk though the process of backing up and restoring your WordPress website is with the popular plugin Updraft.
- Making sure you have enough storage for a backup/restore
- How to take a backup
- How to restore your backup
Making sure you have enough storage for a backup/restore
Before committing to taking a backup of your site, you need to ensure you have enough disk space in the original backup location. You will need the minimum of the existing size of the website you want to backup available disk quota. For example if your website is 500MB, you will need at least 500MB in free space for the backups. Note, the backup files will be .zip format, but the majority of files won’t compress that much.
The same as ensuring you have enough storage space on original backup location, you also need to ensure you have enough space to restore the site to the new location. Again this will be the initial size of the. zip backup AND the restored site. So if your backup is 500MB, you will need at least this, plus another 500MB+ for the restore.
How to take a backup
- Login to the site you wish to migrates WordPress admin section
- Using the left side menu, click Plugins, Add New, use the Search to search for UpdraftPlus
- Next to the search result for “UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin” click in the Install Now button, it will change to installing, then to activate. Once its changed to blue, click Activate
- Once activated you will be taken to the plugins page with the UpdraftPlus settings popup, click the button “Press here to start“
- You will now be taken to the plugin to take your first backup, here you can use the tool tips to explore the advanced features, for this guide we are going to close these tips buy clicking the close icon
- Now we are ready to take a full backup of the site (Files & Database), make sure you are on the Backup/Restore tab, and click the big blue Backup Now button.
- Ensure both the Include your database in the backup & Include your files in the backup boxes are ticked and click, backup now. Depending on the size of your site (articles, images, attachments) this can take a little while.
Once complete, you will see your new backup under the heading, Existing backups. You can download the backup data individually by clicking on the relevant buttons, Database, Plugins, Themes, Uploads, Others. You need to make sure you download all these files to have a complete backup.
How to restore your backup
When restoring a backup taken with Updraft, its best to do this on a new clean WordPress installation as it will overwrite and replace all your existing WordPress posts, pages, plugins, uploads and users.
- Login to the site you wish to restore the backup to.
- Next to the search result for “UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin” click in the Install Now button, it will change to installing, then to activate. Once its changed to blue, click Activate.
- Once installed, using the left menu, click Settings, UpdraftPlus Backups
- Under the existing backups heading you will see a few options, Upload backup files, Rescan local folder for new backup sets and Rescan remote storage. In this guide we are going to use the upload backup files method.
- Click the Upload backup files, then select the backed up files from your local machine and upload them. If you are having issues uploading via the WordPress interface, you can upload these files via FTP to the /wp-content/updraft/ directory. If you do upload via FTP, click the Rescan local folder for new backup sets link.
- Once uploaded, under the Actions header, click the Restore button
- The restore process will commence and if all is well it will restore your site as backed up.
- You will now need to login using your username and password from the initially backed up website.
That’s it, your WordPress site should now of been fully restored using your backups!
