How to backup your WordPress site to Amazon S3 using BackWPup backup plugin (Part 2 of 5)

After trying a few free WordPress backup plugins and experimenting with a few manual and semi-automated processes for backups, I have settled on the BackWPup plugin for automating the backups of my WordPress websites.

To install the plugin, login to your WordPress site as an admin, then

1. Click on “Add New” under Plugins
2. Search for “BackWPup”
3. Click “Install Now”

The plugin will install itself. After it says “Successfully installed …”,

1. Click the “Activate Plugin” link to activate the plugin

After you activiate the plugin, the plugins list page will be displayed.

1. Click the “Settings” links under BackWPup

1. Click the “Settings” link in the top-right menu
2. Change the email address to be your own email address if needed. By default your admin email will be used.
3. Change “0” to “7” to save the last 7 log files. This is only useful for troubleshooting.
4. Click “Save Change”

You will not need to change anything else on this screen (unless you know what you are doing).

1. Click “Jobs”
2. Click “Add New”

After you click the ‘Add New” button, the Job Settings screen s displayed.
This screen can look quite daunting, but fear not — to create a manual backup Job you can pretty much accept all the defaults.

1. Just provide a name (I suggest calling this job “Manual Backup”)
2. Uncheck the checkbox which says “Only send an e-mail if there are errors.” — I like to receive emails on successful completion of the backup as well. This provides me with the peace of mind knowing that the job completed successfully. The notification will be sent to the email specified here. You can change it to a different email address if you prefer
3. Click “Save Changes”
4. Click the “Jobs” link to go back to the jobs listing screen

And you have created a Manual Backup “job” (A “job” here just means a specific configuration).

When we execue this job, the backup file will get created in the directory indicated in the “Backup to Directory” section. Make a note of this directory.

1. Click the “Run Now” link under the job you just created (The Run Now link will appear when you move your mouse over the name of the job)

You will see the output of the backup process as shown above.
In my case I get two warnings that I can safely ignore.

Once this process is completed, open your favorite FTP program and download the ZIP file from the Download directory that you noted in the step above.
Make sure you can open the generated ZIP file using your favorite archove utility (you can download the free and very good 7-Zip archive utility if you don’t have WinZip).

That’s it! You have successfully created a manual backup of your website.

In the next two articles we will signup for Amazon S3 and configure the plugin to store the backup files in Amazon S3.