How to Create Automatic WordPress Backup

Backup is one of the vital tasks every website should have after installing WordPress. As this is the only way to save your website during mishappenings on your website. It takes full assurance that your website is secured without losing any data in other locations. So, even after any mishap, you can easily get back to your website.

Now, not everyone remembers to have a backup often. So in this situation, scheduling automatic backups is the only way you can get easy backups.

While WordPress does not take the oath to have backups on your website. You need to use a third-party tool or plugins to do so.

Automatic WordPress backup is the process you can set the time, date, and day of the backup you want. After setting this, the tool automatically does the needful at the right time. This is the best and most secure method you can have backups for your website. And there are plenty of tools to help you raise Automatic WordPress Backup easily.

So in this article, we are going to guide you on Automatic WordPress Backups. Before that, let us find the reasons behind scheduling Automatic backups. It's very important to learn to take backup for creating a WordPress Website.

Why should you set Automatic WordPress Backup on your website?

• A backup is nothing but a safe copy of your website stored in another destination. A backup is a vital thing to do when you own a business website. It includes all copies of your website data, database files, and other content.
• This is obvious that no website is secured nowadays. Threats are the ongoing factors that every website has to go through. In this case, you may lose your content through malware, hard drive failure, or any other. But when you have a proper backup of your site, you can restore your data immediately.
• Another reason for having automatic backups is to update your content. Not every day, but you will update your website content once in a while or a year. And some updates often delete your existing data. But automatic backups can save you from this. Scheduled automatic backups will back up your data without knowing you can easily get your data back.

Scheduling Automatic WordPress Backup on your website

Scheduling Automatic WordPress backups is not a crucial process when you have the right backup plugin. You can choose from thousands of backup plugins from the WordPress directory.

Here in this article, we are going to pick the BackWPup plugin which is one of the popular backup plugins.

• BackWPup is a freemium plugin that offers quality backup features for your website. Backing up your website using BackWPup is a simple process along with scheduling automatic backups. It is ranging its value of active installations to 700000 giving immense features and services. It gives access to a wide variety of storage locations and file formats making it the best choice for business websites.
• Moreover, it offers complete backup solutions along with storage in the cloud, device, email, or FTP. The best thing that makes it a popular choice is its ease of use. Additionally, it offers manual backups, integration with cloud services, and multisite networks.
• It has a free and a premium version for backing up your website. The free version offers secured data storage by running jobs in the plugin. But when in need to restore the site data automatically, you need to have the premium version.

Now in this article, we will learn how to schedule automatic WordPress backup using the free version and the below steps:

Step 1: Install and Activate the BackWPup Plugin

• Reach the admin dashboard of your website and click on the Plugins option.
• Select the Add New button and this will take you to the Plugins page.
• Here, you have to search for the BackWPup plugin and click to install.
• Once done installing, activate the plugin.
• This will display the plugin on the sidebar of your WordPress admin dashboard.

Step 2: Create Backup Jobs

• After installing the plugin, head towards the admin area and tap the Jobs options under the BackWPup plugin.
• On the jobs page, click on the Add New button to add a new job.
• Now, set the name of your job under the General Settings tab. This helps you locate particular jobs you have created.
• After this, you must select the type of backup tasks you wish to perform under the Job tab. Here, you will find database backups, file backups, plugins and even scheduling.
• You can even check the database files while applying backups by ticking next to the Check Database Tables option.
• Next, you need to select the archive format type. The default option Zip is already ticked, you can choose tar Gzip or Tar archive as well.
• Now, it's time to decide the Job Destination where the backup files will be stored. You can choose from servers, emails, backup to FTP, Dropbox, Amazon S3, and more.
• Once every change is done, click on Save Changes to set the backup.

Step 3: Schedule Automatic WordPress Backups

• Finally, the step has come when you can schedule automatic backups by using the jobs.
• On the jobs page itself, you will find the Schedule section. Tap the Schedule tab and you will see different options to set automatic backup jobs. It includes the start job, schedule execution time, scheduler type, and the scheduler.
• The Start job section includes Manually, WordPress cron, using links, and more. By default, it will tick the manual option. But you have to select the WordPress cron to schedule the task.
• After that, select the scheduler type as basic and jump to the next option. The basic section will let you schedule backups every month, day, week, or hour. You can even choose the day, date, and time of the backup.
• The advanced option will let you schedule automatic WordPress backups for a whole year. Advanced users can use more scheduling options like using a URL to begin external or using the WP-CLI interface.
• Apart from these, we recommend you use the basic option to schedule daily or weekly backups.

Important Files to backup

Backing up WordPress involves mostly the database and content. The Files tab in the BackWPup settings page will help you choose which files to back up. You can select the installed content, plugins, themes, and other media on the website. Gutenberg WordPress Themes Files are a must to backup as it will save all the changes you have made in themes.

Automatic Backup with cPanel

cPanel seems to be one of the popular control panels for managing the website and its server. With this, the standalone servers are converted into a simplified point-and-click platform.

Mostly, the cPanel comes along with the hosting packages and can be used by other users for personal and enterprises.

This control panel supports two types of interfaces, one is the user interface called cPanel. And the other is the server management interface called the Web Hosting Manager.

These types of servers combine to allow users to manage websites along with hosting services to manage the server.

And now, talking about the backup solutions in cPanel. The backup solution in cPanel comes with two choices:

Automatic Full Account Backup.

This type allows downloading the website content as a whole. Including the home directory, database, email accounts, domain name server settings, and more.

Automatic Home Directory Backup.

This is the feature that downloads the home directory website data. And mostly, the downloaded files are website files and emails.

Automatic Full Account Backup

Here are the guiding steps on how to back up your entire website with cPanel:

• Get logged in to your cPanel control panel from the hosting account provided by the Hosting provider.
• Search for the Backup menu under the Files section and open it.
• Then on the other page, tap the “Download the Full Backup Account” button.
• You have to select the Home Directory as your Backup location from the dropdown list.
• Lastly, tap the Generate Backup button and click the Go Back option to check whether the backup file is downloading.
• This is it. Just click on the generated backup file to start downloading and the backup will be done automatically.

Automatic Home Directory Backup

• The Home Directory comes under the partial backup feature of the cPanel. This feature of the cPanel allows one to download the vital parts of the website.
• While this is a very simple and easy process to perform. You just need to visit the cPanel and tap the Backup Menu.
• After this, click on the Partial Backups and then on the Home Directory button.
• Once done, this will start downloading the backup automatically.

Automatic WordPress backups are way more relaxing than remembering backups every time. And therefore, we have made it easier to schedule automatic WordPress backup for your website. I hope this article has given enough details so that you can schedule automatic WordPress backups on your site easily.