Should we be using "Incremental Backup" for FluentCommunity and FluentCart?
Yikes! If my/our site crashes and our host provider does nightly backups, then we can lose up to one day's worth of conversations or transactions! What's the appropriate backup technology to use? This is an extremely critical decision for us who are "self-hosting" using WPManageNinja plugins and not using cloud based systems like Circle.so and WooCommerce. What is everyone using for backup?
I'm using TeamUpdraft as a WordPress plugin connected to AWS S3 for storage. You can configure incremental and full backups, with plenty of granularity, on whatever schedule you want. No problems so far.
William Beem William! Great to hear from you. Well, I just went through the documentation and then verified with Claude (whatever that's worth) and we both found that there is no incremental backup for the wordpress database. It's only backed up on a full backup.
Hmmm.
Mark Halvorson This is a screnshot from one of my sites. You can configure File backups and Database backups indiviedually. As you can see here, I have daily database backups. You could make it hourly or select other increments.
William Beem Aww, thanks for doing a screenshot. I see now. And I see that for you, if your site crashes you are willing to lose up to a day's worth of conversations in your community. I can't afford that with mine. I WILL be using FluentCart and wouldn't want to lose any transactions. Hmmm. Thanks William.
Mark Halvorson Well, let me give you a slight correction. That screenshot is from my blog, not my community site. I don't need frequent backups on my blog because I don't publish as frequently as I do in the community.
That's yet another reason why I advocate separating the publishing site/installation from the community site/installation.
In any case, you have options to choose if you go with TeamUpdraft. I'm very pleased with this backup plugin.
William Beem I understand. I use Cloudways for all 20 of my websites and daily backups have served me well throughout the years. It's only now that I have FluentCommunity, and shortly FluentCart that made me realize that I have a new responsibility.
Cloudways allows restoring everything EXCEPT the database. This is probably what I'm after for now. I'm just afraid adding functionality to my site will crash and I need to roll back th site but I don't want to also roll back the database.
In addition there is a plugin called "WP Time Capsule" that uses an approach that effectively mimics backing up every DB transaction, but saving that chunk separately on our WP database and then backing it up every hour to Amazon S3 or BackBlaze B2. So that's a finer granularity.
I do incremental backups with xcloud.
Donald McGuinn It seems from reading the xCloud documentation, xCloud's most frequent backup is daily.
Mark Halvorson Yes. That would be fine for my blog. However, the cost would be higher for the number of sites I have compared to using TeamUpdraft, and I wouldn't have as much flexibility for backups.
ManageWP, which I love for so many reasons, can be set to do hourly backups.
Shahjahan Jewel I wonder how WPManageNinja backs up this site here and their FluentCart system.
I backup my tables every hour (folder saves last 48 but I set to longer when I go on vacation - this is one of the most annoying things to do but had a big client's website get hacked once when I was on vacation so I learned my lesson) and server backs up website daily for files. Have additional weekly backups to offsite locations.
I use Duplicator Pro. A long time ago I did some custom code for a client that triggered a database backup after every purchase. Moved them to Shopify when there store got big to not have to worry about this exact thing.
It's actually not incredibly difficult to export a table via code. The biggest issue is keeping up with any changes to the services (aka AWS SDK). Obviously, it's easier to click buttons and if there's an issue to call tech support rather than having to troubleshoot it yourself.
Who knows, maybe someday there will be a Fluent Backup plugin that I will gladly give my money to because WP Manage Ninja is the best!
Perhaps this plugin which captures every change as they happen, would work:
https://wptimecapsule.com/
Restoration is a little more involved however.
It's been on my radar to try for some time, but I have not yet.
Dominic Osborne I remember looking at them awhile back. I'll have to take another look soon. Thanks for remind me. :)
With xCloud, you can backup only once a day (at least at the moment). With ServerAvatar, you can make it more frequent.,
I always use a server backup and a backup plugin. If you're looking for a very good one, search for WPVivid. They have a very affordable lifetime deal.
I rely on WPMUDEV for my hosting needs, and I'm thrilled with their service! They offer daily backups as part of the package, or you can opt for hourly backups for just an additional $5 per month. So far, my experience has been nothing short of excellent, with zero issues to report!
I use Borg for backups hourly. What has been a test case at first, became the rule after Borg backs up within a few seconds. I have a custom server, though. Backups are incremental, encrypted and stored remotely.
I use the server backups on my webhosting company, zogohost.com (shameful plug) however, a couple of my clients insist on hourly back ups.. we use backuply. I can't attest how good it is as we have never had an issue yet, hopefully we NEVER find out. below is a pic of their documentation.