Warning geek talk for geek people. You’ve been warned. 🙂
We are big fans of BackupBuddy. We use it almost everyday. It’s a fantastic tool to migrate a website, in a few click you are done. But it’s also very useful to automatically backup your site. They support several remote places like local, ftp, S3, Dropbox.
We use all those remote possibilities, some have some advantages over others.
Local backup are simple, but for us it doesn’t fit with the idea of backups, the backup needs to be in another place than the site itself. If there is hardware problem, what are you going to do? We just use local backups when we do site transfers.
Dropbox is great, but if the site is too big then it doesn’t work. Speed is not that great because it depends of your speed, and at the end the backup will end up in one of your computer, and if your computer is off for several days, my guess is that you might lose some crucial backups. It’s nice to use for non important sites.
Amazon S3 is great, reliable and fast (super fast), but you don’t want to put your Amazon Keys on a client website, because they’ll have access to your key. We use it for our sites, it’s actually our top choice now. And it’s very affordable. We recommend it to our customers, but the setup and sign up scare some people, so sometimes we have to use other solutions.
Ftp is simple, old and reliable technology, pretty convenient, easy to setup. We use it for some of our clients.
But there was a bug, it didn’t affect a lot of people (I guess), but it did affect us, and it was bad, because the backups were not reliable, which defeats the whole purpose of automatic backups. Our latest backups didn’t show up on our ftp server, even though BackupBuddy said that everything went smoothly. Strange, scary and not the functionalities we were looking for.
Once we found the bug, we went to the BackupBuddy forum, but getting a fix wasn’t fast enough for us, so we decided to dig into that problem, look at the BackupBuddy code (which is good by the way), and try to find a fix. An hour later, bam, we got a fix. It was related to putting some limit in the number of archives we wanted to the remote site. The way the ftp server returns the list fo files is not consistent between all server. BackupBuddy assumed so, and just reverses the list and deletes the last files. Which in our case was our latest backup!
The fix was easy, we did mention it to BackupBuddy support and it’s going to be integrated in the next release. We are pretty excited that we were able to contribute to such a popular WordPress plugin. And especially that we helped them make it more reliable.
Another problem solved. That’s what we do at the WordPress Help Club.
Still not a member? Join now.
And for the non geek people, we have our maintenance program. Easy.
