When we first started using WordPress to power our own website earlier this year we were pleased to see that there were a few plugins available to back up our site but disappointed that none of them offered true online backup.
Blogging is big business and if you’ve invested hundreds or thousands of hours writing blog posts you need to have the proper systems in place to ensure that something as simple as disk failure at your web host doesn’t mean all your work is lost.
To help the blogging community we’re giving a way a free plugin with 50 MiB of free space on our secure servers.
5 Steps to Total Protection
- Step 1: Download the plugin here.
- Step 2: Upload the plugin to your blog using the Plugins > Add New > Upload feature in your WordPress Dashboard.
- Step 3: Register for your 50 MiB of free space on our backup portal.
- Step 4: Configure your plugin to enable encryption and provide the login details of your online account by clicking Change Settings on the Tools > Online Backup page.
- Step 5: Schedule your backup by clicking Change Schedule on the same page!
Your WordPress database is now protected! You can then proceed to login to our backup portal to manage and download your backups.
Your Data is Secure
At Backup Technology we specialize in online backup and disaster recovery. We provide enterprise level backup services to businesses and individuals complete with disaster recovery plans and tests involving the recovery of entire networks.
All of the data backed up by our customers is highly encrypted and compressed and stored in our primary secure datacentre in Manchester, with a complete mirror of every single backup in our secondary secure datacentre in London.
So with our experience and expertise you can be assured your WordPress database will be in good hands.
Features
Our plugin has been built bottom up and based around creating a highly secure and reliable backup plugin with all the features a blog master requires to protect their blog content.
While developing the plugin we worked closely with several major blog owners in order to get the right features implemented in the way they wanted them. Following is an overview of the major features.
- Online Backup
Our plugin was built with remote online backup in mind.
This saves you space in your mailbox by storing your backups on our secure servers. Every site will get a 50 MB free quota, and when it is reached the oldest backups will be removed to make space for the newest, so you will always have the latest backups available. Each time a backup is added we’ll also send you a notification email to give you peace of mind that backups are actually happening.
To setup Online Backup you just need to register an account with us and configure the plugin with your login details, as described in the instructions above, and you can login to our backup portal anytime to manage and download your backups. - Locked Backups
To prevent an older backup from being overwriting by newer backups, you can login to our backup portal and “lock” it! This will mark the backup as permanent and prevent it from ever been overwritten. Be sure to leave enough unlocked backups so you can still receive new ones though! - Email Backup
As well as been able to send backups to our secure servers for storage, you can have backups sent as email attachments directly to your inbox. The email attachment is also compressed and encrypted in the same as with Online Backup.
To decrypt an ecrypted backup emailed to you, simply use the “Decrypt a Backup” page in the plugin. - Compression
With the majority of blog posts been text documents, compression techniques can work extremely well. Using the built-in ZLIB support available in nearly all PHP installations today, our plugin can backup a 50 MiB wordpress database into a miniscule 5 MiB file (that’s a 90% reduction!)
And with a 50 MiB storage quota FREE… that would give you 10 days of backups! - Encryption
Fully supporting the “php-mcrypt” extension available on most web servers, our plugin will allow you to encrypt your backups with DES, AES128 or AES256 encryption.
All you need to do is simply enter the settings page, choose an encryption type (we recommend AES128 for the best balance encryption) and enter a password to use as your secret encryption key. Once done, every one of your backups will be encrypted before been emailed to you and/or sent to our secure servers, giving you peace of mind that nobody will ever be able to access your information without your secret encryption key.
However, we must stress that you do not lose your secret encryption key! If you don’t have the key you will never be able to access the backup. It’s that secure! - Scheduling
Don’t want to have to run a backup yourself on a daily basis? Just configure our plugin to run on one of your WordPress schedules!
You can have it send the backup to our secure servers and also have it email it to you when the schedule runs. - On-Demand Backup
Just added a large amount of blog posts in a short space of time? Just go to the Online Backup plugin page and kick-off an on-demand backup. You can have it sent to our secure servers, emailed to you, and even download it directly to your computer as soon as it finishes.
Support & Bug Reporting
If you have any problems using the plugin or require support you can check out common problems and solutions on our FAQ page. If you continue to have problems you can feel free to leave a comment below and we will endeavour to answer as soon as possible (normally within a few working days).
Screenshots
Does this just backup the database or does it do files (plugins, themes)?
Hi Nick,
Thanks for the question, at the moment the plugin just backs up the database to our datacentres. Our developers are currently working on adding the backup of plugins and themes so I would recommend that you start making use of the free service now and we will notify all registered users as soon as new versions and features are available.
Ritchie
It is important to make it clear that you can only install plugins in self hosted wordpress sites. If you have a wordpress hosted site (like http://example.wordpress.com), wordpress doesn’t allow you to install any plugins.
Ah, fantastic! I’ve dabbled with a number of backup plugins, and none of them are quite comprehensive – the ability to schedule everything to backup to the cloud, and to subsequently clean away outdated files will be a great help.
How about backing up images and other uploaded media files in wp-content – is that going to be included and how soon?
Hello – thanks for this great plug-in and for offering it at no cost!
I’ve got everything setup so that it says “Yes” and is green in the overview, but then I get this error message in my inbox:
The backup request failed. The WordPress plugin denied the request.
The error the plugin returned was: The backup file requested was not found!
Either it has already been retrieved or the temporary folder was emptied between the backup completing and the server requesting it.
What am I doing wrong? Thanks!
Look promising indeed. Anyway, How do we restore once the disaster happen using the plugin?
Thank you for a great plugin. However I have some sites that once a week would be plenty, may want to offer that or just a way for us to easily schedule how often we want. I have some sites that just don’t need daily backups. Would save some space
Thanks again
Rick
I am having difficulties with the tmp directory. Seems like a permissions problem.
Hi Guys – Awesome product. Making it free is overly generous, IMHO, not that I’m complaining. Question: do you need a separate backup account for each blog you want to backup here? I’ve just (successfully) backed up one of my blogs, and can’t see any reference in the backup list to the name of the blog, which suggests to me that a backup account is designed for just one blog. Might be one for the FAQ, this.
I have some problems activating the plugin. the error is:
“Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘&’, expecting T_VARIABLE or ‘$’ in /hom*******/wp-content/plugins/wponlinebackup/wponlinebackup.php on line 1812″
I downloaded the plugin from https://wordpress.backup-technology.com/Download today.WordPress is reporting it as version 1.0.3
regards, Jonas
Nce, thanks. 2 questions:
- Does it work on WPMU, so that every blog account can have its own backup (up to 50mb)
- What happens if the back up > 50mb itself (some image caches are big for example)
- Ok, a 3rd question :) What are the costs for a larger back up space?
Thanks!
Your blog is amazing, i first landed to another post but then get interested and thought, i will just look a little more arround to see what else i can find out about best plugins arround.
@dave – We will be implementing a file level backup feature to backup uploaded content etc in the coming months.
@kyle rohde – This might happen if you ran another backup before the server could retrieve the previous one. There is currently a known issue on some servers where WordPress triggers the backup schedule multiple times simultaneously (mainly on larger websites that don’t use crond.) We’ll be fixing this in the next version as we’ll be replacing WordPress scheduling with our own, more customizable, scheduler.
@rick_fairbanks – Next version :)
@rick@rickety – Looks like an issue with the server setup if you cannot access the /tmp directory – maybe try contacting your host? Or you could try going into settings and changing the folder from /tmp to your home directory. Make sure the folder is NOT inside your public HTML folder though. Usually the home folder is something like /home/username/ and the public HTML folder is a subfolder in there. You could easily create one for backups – although the /tmp is the best option as on most servers it is automatically emptied so you won’t get any orphan files left behind if PHP crashes etc and it won’t count towards your disk quota in most cases.
@chris – Will add to FAQ – we currently require an account to be registered for each blog.
@jonas_bergenudd – Hi Jonas, is this running on PHP4? I’ve just noticed it and will fix it in the next version.
@harry, biketravellers.com
1. I’ve not tested the plugin on WordPress MU yet and I’m not sure of the differences it has to standard WordPress. If I find some spare time I’ll take a quick look at it though.
2. If the backup is higher than 50 MiB the backup will be rejected – the server will only accept backups smaller than the quota. There isn’t really any reason to backup caches though – you’d just rebuild them in the case of a disaster – so you should be able to just exclude that table from the backup.
3. We haven’t considered offering more than 50 MiB yet – although we can adjust the quota on per-user basis – so feel free to get in contact with us if you are interested in more. We actually still consider the current versions as Release Candidates – we released them early as we thought the best way to make the plugin better would be to hear from the people who would eventually be using it :)
Thanks Jason – so nothing I can do about it now? It keeps happening on a daily basis for me – any idea when the next version is coming? Just trying to decide if I should get rid of the plugin for now.
Thanks!
I have several blogs and FTP all files from my local computer; I periodically download from my WP blogs to my computer so I already have local, updated copies of all files and plugins. What I don’t have and find problematic is a simple way to do a database backup, so this will be a perfect fit.
I’m also using WordPress Multi-User (MU) on one blog site (http://conservative-twitterers-4-free-speech.org)but since I believe one database takes care of all blogs the issue of backing up each blog individually shouldn’t be necessary. If I’m wrong, someone can correct me, but since I setup WP-MU and only created one database, it seems this is how it works.
Hi guys,
Looks good! I have a couple of questions:
1. Will this plugin be OSS?
2. Is it possible to backup to a different server than yours without modifying the code?
Thanks,
James
Very smart backup system Good service to give for example clients. They can see they get a backup once per day. It would be great if it also could backup files in plugin and particular thems. Thanks for the plugin
Tried to activate your plugin and got the following error message:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘&’, expecting T_VARIABLE or ‘$’ in /kunden/174358_70794/rp-hosting/5612/6612/guerrillablog/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wponlinebackup/wponlinebackup.php on line 1812
Any ideas what to do?
Thanks and best regards from Germany
Anthony
@kyle – Could you try the BETA development version? You can download it here: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wponlinebackup.zip
Also, if that doesn’t work – change the temporary directory in settings to something other than “/tmp/” – the only other reason for the failures would be your /tmp folder is getting cleared every minute. Try changing the path to your home directory but make sure you don’t put it to a path you can access from the internet, or if you do, block it using .htaccess file or something.
Hi Guys,
Thanks for what sounds like a great and much needed plugin. I have installed it but run into a bit of a problem when configuring. I have tried to change the settings and then pressed the save settings button. I then get a blank page. The url for the blank page is listed below.
http://www.whitbyseaanglers.co.uk/wp-admin/tools.php?page=wponlinebackup%2Fwponlinebackup.php&settings
I would love to get this working as it will save me a lot of time effort and stress each week.
Many thanks – Glenn
@glenn kilpatrick – Could you send me your WordPress version and the settings are you trying to use to support@backup-technology.co.uk please? Thanks.
Jason, love the plugin, but have a little bug fix for you.
In wponlinebackup.php you define a constant called MY__TOOLS_URL__ with the following code:
[code]define ('MY__TOOLS_URL__', WPOnlineBackup_Fix_HTTPS(get_bloginfo('url')) . '/wp-admin/tools.php');[/code]
It would be better to use get_bloginfo(‘wpurl’) as this uses the url for the directory that wordpress is installed in, not where the blog is served from.
I’ve made this amendment to my copy and haven’t noticed any side affects, I don’t think that value gets used anywhere else, although it would probably be prudent to check.
Sorry, I forgot to mention the symptoms of the above problem. When I’d updated the settings page, the redirect that occurs gives you a 404 instead of taking you back to the status page.
e.g. in my install, the redirect goes to http://my-domain/wp-admin/tools.php?page=wponlinebackup/wponlinebackup.php
It should go to http://my-domain/wpress/wp-admin/tools.php?page=wponlinebackup/wponlinebackup.php
Hi Jason,
My apologies. I updated my site and ran the task again. This time it completed ok. Please forgive me for wasting your time. Great plugin by the way, it gives me a little more piece of mind.
hello! for restore?
@glenn kilpartrick:
That’s good news :) Thanks for letting us know and thanks for the great feedback.
@richard benwell:
I fixed it in 1.0.6, thanks for the fix! I put credit in the change log for you :)
@gofree (sorry I didn’t see the post last time!) & @atomnex:
https://wordpress.backup-technology.com/FAQ
First entry on the FAQ. Basically we recommend you do the restore manually with CPanel/WHM PhpMyAdmin or something. Nearly all servers have it. Just delete all the WordPress tables and then import the backup file and it will recreate them exactly as they were at the time of the backup. If your backup file is encrypted though (extension is .gz.enc instead of .gz) you’ll need to decrypt it first of course – you can do this using the plugin.
We are planning on a restore option in the plugin eventually though but we don’t have any ETA on it – either way we’d always recommend it be done outside PHP.
Hello,
unfortunately i can´t save the settings getting a fatal error message concerning the Temporary directory to store backup file. What di i have to write there? can you give me an example?
Hello,
No matter what I try, I cannot change the encryption option to be off from the settings page.
How do I cure this ?
Thanks.
This is a fabulous plugin! I have spend countless hours testing every WordPress backup solution in existence and this is the best one that I have found. It does everything it says it will do and the feature list is quite complete except for two things. It doesn’t back up the WordPress website files and it is limited to only one website. I believe there are many website managers who are dying to have these features in addition to me.
Surely, you are working on a fee-based plan to allow complete backups for multiple sites. How soon do you think it will it be ready?
Hello,
I really like the concept of this plugin. However, when I try to run a backup I get:
Transmission: Failed to initialize connection to backup server, the connection seemed to fail. The error message from WordPress was: http_request_failed – SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details:error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed.
Any ideas?
Thanks
Hi there
Just noticed that this hasn’t been working properly since April 4th. Trying to do a manual backup to test it – it creates a .BAK file on my server, but the backup stutters to a halt at 50%.
Tried 4 manual backups now, and I’m tired at looking at the same blue line in hope.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
Just downloaded the plugin and I have followed all the steps but getting the follow message “The blogurl you specified appears to be malicious. Please note that this plugin will only work on public websites, and not within an intranet or home network.” Is this something silly at my end?
.
@marici
You will need to specify a file path on your server. Is “/tmp” not working? If it isn’t you are probably best contacting your website host to set up a secure directory in your webspace that can be used. Unfortunately I can’t offer much help without knowing the setup of your webhost’s server. When I get around to finishing off the next version it will offer a nice tool to help you setup this folder and be able to check it is secure and stuch. Until then you will be best contacting your host.
@ram_lubhai
Try version 1.0.7 here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wponlinebackup/download/
I’ve finished alpha testing and just waiting on beta testers to confirm, but they haven’t had any issues with it so far so I’m going to release it within the next few days.
@rick
Thanks for the feedback! We’ll be adding these features soon.
@john
Looks like your server might have an out of date CA store. Contact your website host’s support, the certificate on our site is definitely valid.
@john buchanan
Could you send a snapshot of where it stutters to a halt to support@backup-technology.co.uk? Put WordPress plugin in the subject and make reference to this post (or include it.) I’m wondering if it is hitting a large table and the server has timeout limits. It should recover from timeouts though.
@noel
Could you send your blogurl to support@backup-technology.co.uk? Put WordPress plugin in the subject and refer to the comment you’ve made. It’ll be clear what is wrong once we see it.
Thanks all for the feedback!
First: Thanks a lot for this GREAT plugin!
Second: I get this error message:
Transmission: [Error] The blogurl you are sending this backup from does not match the one registered on this account. The blogurl you are using is ‘http://blogorama.eisbrecher.net’, and the specified user account is registered for blogurl ‘http://blogorama.eisbrecher.net/’.
Any idea how I can fix this? Thanks again!
Hi rudi,
Just login to the wordpress.backup-technology.com website and change the blogurl so it doesn’t end in a forward slash. We’ll improve this soon so it isn’t so stringent.
Jason.
I keep getting this message:
“A backup is already in progress. Please wait for this backup to complete before running a manual one. If the backup hung it should timeout in 30 seconds.”
It doesn’t do any scheduled backups and doesn’t do any manual backups anymore. I am NOT SURE but maybe this problems started after I restored FROM one of your backup databases which I re-installed using phpMyAdmin or whatever it is. I did the re-install following explicit directions. The WordPress Blog http://energywithmaxgxl.com/ was RESTORED PERFECTLY.
Unfortunately, I can’t get your GREAT PLUGIN to actually create anymore backups. It stopped backing up around the time I did the restore, but probably AFTER my restore.
In any event, I have no idea why this is not working anymore. I was so excited about this plugin, and I want that enthusiasm back so I can recommend this plugin to all my WordPress Blog Clients.
Thanks so much.
Jupiter Jim
Hi Jupiter Jim,
Try reinstalling the plugin. If this fails, drop us an email at support@backup-technology.co.uk.
Jason.
Thanks, Guys.
You are truly the best. There is another fairly decent backup plugin, but the developer or whatever he is who now runs the blog for the plugin support literally takes over TWO WEEKS to reply to a plugin problem or question!!!
That is why I searched desperately until I found you guys AND your plugin. A plugin is NOT much good without support.
OK, so everything is backing up perfectly after the quick re-install. Yeah!
I need to restore from a backup again to retest the whole process, but it definitely seems to be backing up my databases just fine.
Thanks so much for the speedy reply!
Jupiter Jim
Thanks for the feedback Jupiter Jim :)
We’ve found what we think might be the issue after a restore. We’re going to get it fixed within the next few days.
Thanks again and we hope you enjoy the plugin! :)