BackupBuddy, for backups, backups in general etc, any good?

Question

So long story short, i was told by a new job that they want me to migrate 2 WP sites to other hosting id assume.

now, im a so-so WP noob....i googled around so that when i go into work, i atLEAST have some notion of what im doing lol, and then i came across "backupbuddy" lets call it (BB) for now.

so long story short, to test, i installed BB in my local wp install(WAMP), did the deed, and then took the files to my local WP install on my mac(MAMP) and i swear, in less than 5 minutes, i was done, it took it ALL and....yeah, done.

When i tested on the mac WP, AFAIK, everything went through from plug ins to pages/posts/comments...even custom themed stuff i was working on etc..everything... and so...you know

"If its too good to be true it usually is" and that whole shtick.

i just want to make sure im ok b4 i do anything bad and break the site or something.

my question is, Is this reliable? can i use this and be done with it or is there anything im going to need to know in general? anything i need to look out for etc...

any thoughts/ tips/ advice / links etc ill gladly appreciate.

Thanks in advanced.

Answer 1

Simple answer - Backupbuddy is idiot proof. I use it for all my client Web sites that purchase a maintenance plan which includes scheduled backups.

Now the boon for me is whenever a client wants something changed on their Web site, I use BB to create a most recent backup, download the archive and install to my local Linux server and now I have a test version I can muck up. I do not delete the archive as suggested during the BB install though - this way if I screw up some modification, I just delete the extracted site files and re-run BB.

And on average BB updates all the URL's 99% of the time. Rarely do I find a local URL on a remote site. I mention this because I used to use relative URL's for images and such, but with BB I strongly suggest using absolute since BB will convert these automagically.

Answer 2

I use Backup Buddy for each of my personal and client sites. You're looking at 100 active running installations of BB, with regular backup scheduling in place! So that ought to give you an idea of how reliable the plugin is.

With automatic scheduling you can backup to services such as,

• Dropbox
• Amazon S3
• Rackspace (cloud)
• FTP

Or even,

• E-mail

Choose between Full backups or Database backups.

Honestly migrating from your local development machine to a production server has never been easier.

From time to time you might run into the odd server that wont let you extract from an archive in which case you can log in via your Control Panel and extract the archive there before returning to BB or alternatively upload your files uncompressed which is slower albeit.

Also not sure why you'd want to use absolute URLs in any circumstance unless you are creating menu items that link to files on your server that otherwise fall outside of your WordPress install.

If you code your theme correctly then your WP installation, theme and database would be maintain maximum portability.

Answer 3

What about the best strategy for re-uploading changes you have made on your local server to the original wordpress install that you worked on?

I, too, have been very happy with BackupBuddy, both for back-up peace of mind and especially for creating developer environments. I went through many loops before finding it.

Currently, my thought is to create a full backup of my local install with the changes, change the directory of the original install, clear the original database, upload the zip archive and importbuddy script to a new directory of the old name and run it to restore with the new changes.

I might be missing something elemental so I wanted to see if there were opinions from people more experienced. Thanks so much for any ideas.