Backing up a standalone blog on Wordpress in the Google Drive cloud

A decent blog in our time is almost a necessity for every intellectual worker, whom it is customary to call disrespectful as "creacles." If you are a hipster, a creative designer, a self-employed bomb photographer, and so on, you won’t get off with one Facebook; you need your own website, and the site has its own blog, where you post your creos and selfies in the evenings, as you sit there in Jean-Jacques after a busy day, all of these are in checkered leggings and with a glass of celery smoothie. Lose a couple of records - and everything, crying creative, goodbye, mood!

And if you are a serious scientist, entrepreneur or journalist, then any of your blog posts can be, without exaggeration, invaluable. That is why backing up (backing up) your blog is necessary in all respects.

And it is also necessary because you, having a fresh backup on your hands, can do these things without problems:

• Mirror your blog and / or website;
• To transfer the blog to a new platform, without using mysterious utilities;
• Make a copy of the blog for experiments with design or additions;
• Keep "hidden content", i.e., records, for one reason or another, deleted from the blog.

Therefore, for a Wordpress blog on your own website, backup is not only a backup, but also a way to quickly meet sudden material and spiritual needs. If you suddenly scratched your hands to change something, you simply make a copy, then add or remove what you wanted, and do not worry about spoiled impressions from readers and subscribers. In any case, I have repeatedly rejoiced at my forethought, restoring studio studio backups after experimenting with the design ... I personally prefer to save copies in recent years in the cloud, for example, on a Google Drive.
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Why google drive?

The answer is simple: why not? The benefits of cloud backup in recent years are quite obvious. The cloud is not stolen (unless you have compromised the password), it does not fall out of the pocket on the pavement, is not lost at the most inopportune moment in the drawer of the dresser; you will not forget it on the table, going to Pattaya, to Nice, to the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait ... Viruses, lost clusters, mirrors, data synchronization and the like when storing data on a cloud account - a headache of a cloud service administrator, but not yours And finally, the cost of paid space for large amounts of data on cloud storage is already quite comparable with the cost of NAS devices or USB drives, including the overhead of their maintenance and maintenance (the so-called "total cost of ownership").

In general, cloud services for backup are cool! I stored the first backups of my studio site on a Ubuntu cloud, then, when it was covered, I switched to Google Disk. Now this is a cheap, good storage, besides, many Wordpress plug-ins and external utilities support saving backup copies of standalone blogs in this particular cloud. However, I don’t have any particular ideological reasons for preferring Google Drive, especially since my favorite Handy Backup utility in recent versions remarkably supports the backup of Wordpress blogs on Microsoft OneDrive, on AmazonS3, on Dropbox, and on our latest Yandex.Disk, where I have already accumulated almost a terabyte of free space ... However, the article will focus on backing up independent blogs to Google Drive, since this cloud is a kind of "representative", the most obvious and functional representative of a growing family of cloud services .

It must be remembered that typical multifunctional user data clouds are not specialized backup solutions. To extract data from the original and form a copy, you will need some effort and some tools, which are mainly discussed in this article. I consider two fundamentally different approaches to backing up a Wordpress blog to cloud storage: the first one is based on using the Wordpress plugin, the second is using an external utility that avoids working with Wordpress on a logical level. Both of these approaches have both advantages and inherent disadvantages; at the same time, the approaches themselves are not incompatible, but, as scientists say, they do not generate a synergistic action, that is, they do not allow reinforcing each other in mutual use. So, we will start consideration!

Using FTP to manually backup your blog

Let's be honest: a solution for masochists! The meaning is as simple as a boot: the Wordpress directory is considered as a data repository for FTP (SFTP, FTPS), your favorite FTP-client connects to it and voila! You can extort data. Wordpress database you do not copy, only static content. Of course, everything was done manually, and with a tambourine, with a tambourine ... I copied the blog in this way to the Ubuntu cloud service, until I invented some kind of automation. Automation, of course, looked easier than ever: the FTP client was launched from a console script, in turn, managed by the cron scheduler. Everything worked perfectly, but I just had to be a little console and bash virtuoso, and at the same time work out all Linux users' favorite work: “smoke manuals”, as is customary to write about it on the forums. To say that I am an opponent of unwarranted smoking in places not intended for this (including users' brains) means, in fact, to say nothing ...

Anyway, this option deserves a mention. If you are a terminal god, a system administrator with a beard of the biblical patriarch, who is able to restart the switch at a glance, then this method is for you. But then, most likely, you do not need to read this article, and in “Jean-Jacques” you and I will not be allowed in; so instead of smoothies, we will eat kebabs. But if you have mastered this method, you can include your Wordpress backup in much more complex data processing tasks! Therefore, if your goal is not a smoothie, but effective site administration, do not reset FTP and the good old cron scheduler from accounts; they will help you out more than once in a difficult moment of life!

Google Drive for Wordpress Plugin

The first candidate and, judging by the reviews on the Internet, the champion among the built-in backup tools standalone-blogs on Wordpress. To get it, you need to get into the settings of Wordpress plugins on the admin panel and enter the name: Google Drive for Wordpress. Next will start dancing with a tambourine, since you need to create a GoogleID in the Google settings, as well as a project related to your backup. I hasten to please you: as long as you pulled the standard blog and the administration of your personal site, so somehow you will understand the settings of the plugin. When done, set the backup schedule; There are few options here - with the period specified in days, or manually (Days: None). And yet it is much better than pure manual backup management offered by most plugins for both static and dynamic websites.

Backing up your blog with this plugin will, alas, from cover to cover (the so-called full backup). No options for reducing the size, such as incremental or differential backup, are not provided. This is very disappointing, because the actual storage space on Google Drive is not free, and transferring large amounts of blog content over the network does not have the best effect on the performance of network applications as a whole. My resume: the plugin is very suitable for clients of Jean-Jacques, as well as for people who do not want or do not have time to bother with complex backup strategies. In addition, it seems to be free, so that the solution in all senses has attractive sides, despite the above minor flaws.

The described plugin is not the only one capable of working with standalone Wordpress blogs and clouds. There are, for example, an excellent and multifunctional Updraft Plus plugin, the premium version of which (unfortunately, paid) allows you to perform, for example, cloning and mirroring blogs. All such plug-ins require some experience with Wordpress, but are able to provide in exchange for considerable convenience in work.

Handy backup

I would be wrong if I didn’t include my favorite utility in the review. I must say that in the latest version it slightly changed the design, which is why the manual on the site became somewhat unreadable; for the rest, everything remains the same, unless, of course, the list is in a good ten supported clouds, among which, of course, there is Google Drive. The developers claim that the Google cloud is accessed via the API, without the need for synchronization utilities or bridges, and I tend to believe them, since everything worked without problems on my machine without the Google Drive client. From an architectural point of view, Handy Backup works through the same FTP (or its protected counterparts) as the above described method of direct access to the Wordpress directory. In addition, you can copy the database at the same time by selecting the appropriate plug-in for the engine and connecting it to the general backup task, which, believe me, is extremely convenient.

An important difference from crutches for manual work is a user-friendly interface that allows you to choose which data to copy, and which data is not needed for nothing. But in terms of settings and automation, everything is chocolate: full, incremental and differential backup, mixed backup (this is when a full copy is done, followed by a specified number of differential backups, and again a full one); storing multiple versions, deleting old copies, scheduling with accuracy from minutes to months, restarting missed tasks ... The possibility of batch work is not forgotten: you can run a batch file or program from the command line before or after starting the backup task (very convenient, by the way to stop the server!). An additional advantage - Handy Backup stores the copied data in the original formats, which greatly simplifies working with copies, if, say, you decide to fix something.

Summary: in terms of functionality, developers, as always, did not let down, but this program will not appeal to lovers of free solutions. However, the price is quite lifting, given the lack of regular payments and commissions, and for fans of freebies there is a simplified version that also copies data via FTP to the cloud - alas, alas, only on Yandex.Disk. Of course, there are other similar backup utilities; most of them are also not free, and their functionality is very different and is controlled, unfortunately, not by price.

Conclusion

It turned out that I often write here about backing up different data, and usually come to some definite conclusion - what tool to prefer in certain conditions. I must say that this time my instincts are failing me. I installed Handy Backup on my own server (or rather, it was already there for a long time, performing the functions of backup of all static and dynamic content), and for blogs that are hosted by several friends on web hosting, I recommended Wordpress plugins - and it was not lost! In short, the choice of the way Wordpress backup on Google Drive is a classic task for “fast, convenient, free of charge - select any two points”; I hope that my comments on the pros and cons of each of the options will make this choice easier for you. I hope your blog, protected from all accidents, will one day be successful, and you will be taken to Jean-Jacques, or even to the cover of Snob, with a glass of smoothie in your hand. And I have to go back to the natural photography of bears and kebabs in the open air.

See you!