The Complete Guide To Backing Up Your WordPress Sites With ManageWP

Backing Up Your WordPress SiteBacking up your WordPress sites has always been one of those painful necessities, hasn’t it? Fortunately, that no longer has to be the case with ManageWP’s integrated backup tool.

Once you have read this post, you will have backups scheduled for all of your sites in no time. We have created ManageWP’s backup tool to be as quick and intuitive as possible, so that you can simply “set and forget”.

We recommend that you carry out regular backups as follows:

  1. Daily backups of your database (which contains all posts, pages, comments and settings).
  2. Weekly backups of your entire site.

However, you can customize schedules as you see fit.

Let’s get to it!

Step 1 – Backup Creation

When it comes to creating a backup schedule, you have two options.

You can either select the option in your ManageWP dashboard:

Add New Backup

Or you can access the backups management page via the navigation menu:

Manage Backups

The backups screen will come in handy in the future, should you wish to manage your existing backups. We’ll talk about that later.

Once you have selected to add a new backup, you will be presented with a new screen.

Step 2 – Set Task Options

You should see a screen like this:

New Task Options

Let’s go through the settings, one by one.

Now you can choose which websites should be associated with your new backup schedule.

As you can see from the above screenshot, you can select sites individually, or select by group. The latter option can be useful if you have created a backup schedule for a specific type of website, for which you have a group.

Step 3 – Select An External Backup Destination

As I have previously mentioned, it is strongly recommended that you backup your WordPress sites to an external location, and this is the screen at which you can make that choice:

External Backup Destination

As you can see, there are six options:

  1. FTP
  2. SFTP
  3. Amazon S3
  4. Dropbox
  5. Email
  6. Google Drive

Setting up each service is straightforward, and you have the ability to test the connection to confirm that it works.

And that’s it! Hit the “Save” button and you should receive the following message:

Save Settings

Step 5 – Backup Management

If you head back to the backups management page, your newly-created backup will be displayed. It’ll look something like this:

Manage Backups

From this screen, you have total control. In the left column, you can edit your backup schedule, as well as view and download any stored backups. The middle column gives you a brief summary of the schedule, including the backup type and destination. And the right column gives you a status update on the schedule.

That’s It!

You’re now set up to create as many backup schedules as you wish.

We are constantly working to improve ManageWP. If you have any problems with the backup tool, do not hesitate to contact us. If you have an idea for how the tool can be improved, submit it here.

Blog post updated on June 19, 2014

Tom Ewer

Tom Ewer is the founder of WordCandy.co. He has been a huge fan of WordPress since he first laid eyes on it, and has been writing educational and informative content for WordPress users since 2011. When he's not working, you're likely to find him outdoors somewhere โ€“ as far away from a screen as possible!

30 Comments

  1. campbeach

    Any idea to develop the incremental backup option inside the ManageWP?

  2. mscwebmaster0413

    Yeah, Amazon S3 is so confusing, Dropbox is $10 a month, I’m not using Google Drive, and it looks like you don’t support RackSpace Cloud Storage (so easy to set up, and they have good tech support – for free, unlike Amazon S3). Can’t get rid of BackupBuddy until you do.

  3. bodhi

    Amazon S3 back ups are super hard to get backing up regularly and without errors, there is a new version of managewp coming out soon and hopefully it fixes those errors. Other back up plugins have no problem with same files. Big problems if you want to back up your whole site to amazon s3 people!

  4. insilico

    I can successfully backup 10 sites on our server but 1 gives me an error: 504 gateway timeout.
    I suspected the BruteProtect plugin but it failed even when I disabled the plugin.
    Is there anyway I can diagnose this error?

  5. mikepeace

    I’ve setup ManageWP to backup 4 sites all hosted on Rackspace Cloud. Only 1 of the 4 sites backed-up successfully. Has anyone else experienced this with Rackspace Cloud ? The backup settings are identical for all 4 sites.

    Thanks,

    Mike Peace

    1. jpw94

      @mikepeace – have you received an answer to this?

  6. trap328

    Hello all:

    I realize this thread has not been updated in some time but I’m in need of more information as outlined here.

    Will I be able to “Restore” my websites if I need to?

    I will keep exploring the blog for answers in the meantime.

    trap328

    1. Tom Ewer

      Author

      Yes, ManageWP includes a site restoration feature ๐Ÿ™‚

  7. aaron

    We are currently using a combo of ManageWP and BackupBuddy to manage and backup our client sites. We use BackupBuddy primarily for the restore feature they offer. Does the ManageWP backup solution also offer a restoration tool?

    1. Tom Ewer

      Author

      Yep ๐Ÿ™‚

      1. aaron

        Tom thanks for the response! Do you have documentation on the site restore feature? Would like to take a look at the process prior to committing and ditching our current Backup Buddy solution.

        Thanks!

        1. Tom Ewer

          Author

          Hey Aaron,

          No problem! I’m on the blog side of things so I don’t have anything to hand, but I’ve forwarded your request to the team and someone should be in touch shortly!

          Cheers,

          Tom

          1. aaron

            Great, thank you!

          2. Tom Ewer

            Author

            Here you go Aaron: https://managewp.com/user-guide/how-to-use-managewp/backup/how-to-restore-a-backup-using-managewp/. I’d suggest you sign up for a free trial and give it a test drive to see how you like it!

        2. Tom Ewer

          Author

          Here you go Aaron: https://managewp.com/user-guide/how-to-use-managewp/backup/how-to-restore-a-backup-using-managewp/. I’d suggest you sign up for a free trial and give it a test drive to see how you like it!

          1. aaron

            Perfect, thank you sir! As a user of the free account (testing it out) is there an easy way to upgrade on a trial basis to easily try out the backup/restore feature? If email is better or more appropriate at this point: aaron@aikenwebsolutions.com

          2. Tom Ewer

            Author

            You’re using a free account rather than a trial account. If you register again for a trial account then you’ll have access to all features ๐Ÿ™‚

  8. Anthony

    I’d like to know what are the differences between backing up this way and using a plugin called “backupbuddy”?

    Thanks!

    1. Tom Ewer

      Author

      I don’t have a great deal of experience with BackupBuddy, but the main difference is probably the pricing. BackupBuddy is a standalone product, whereas backups in ManageWP are just one small part of a much bigger service that incorporates all sorts of awesome features.

  9. Adam

    Nice. Very much like BackWPup. Maybe I misunderstood, but can you backup multiple sites from just one (1) install of this plugin?

    1. Tom Ewer

      Author

      I’m not sure I follow Adam — this post is about ManageWP’s backup feature (which you certainly can use to backup multiple sites), not BackWPup.

      Cheers,

      Tom

      1. Adam

        Hey Tom. The backup of ManageWP works similarly to BackWPup. I was just making a comparison.

        Regarding ManageWP’s backup, can you backup multiple sites from just one install of ManageWP?

        1. Paul Romijn

          I managed to run the multi-site back-up task from the main domain. Only had to increase the memory limit.

          1. Adam

            Thank, Paul. That’s a great feature to have.

        2. Tom Ewer

          Author

          Hi Adam,

          One ManageWP account can theoretically control an unlimited number of websites, so you can backup multiple sites from one account.

          Cheers,

          Tom

          1. Adam

            Thanks, Tom!

          2. Tom Ewer

            Author

            No problem ๐Ÿ™‚

  10. Paul Romijn

    One of my sites is a multisite netwerk. It contains 3 sites:
    example.com/nl/
    example.com/en/
    and the main site example.com

    Do I need to create a backup for each site, or is just 1 back-up task for the main domain ok?

  11. Mario

    Yes, Jeff is right. Is there no “Restore” option from the backup? It’s not enough to have a backup and not able to automate the Restore too! I might have missed it in the feature list, but can you confirm pls?

  12. thewebsiteguys

    If a group is selected, it will always revert back to the specific sites in that group. Not very useful for when I add in more sites to that group

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Add as many websites as you want for free, no credit card required. Sign up and start saving time!



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Over 65,000 WordPress professionals are already using ManageWP

Add as many websites as you want for free, no credit card required. Sign up and start saving time!



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Over 65,000 WordPress professionals are already using ManageWP

Add as many websites as you want for free, no credit card required. Sign up and start saving time!



Have questions? Get in touch!