Backing up and restoring multiple sites efficiently

Question

We are offering complete website backup and restore services once per month to our clients. 90% of the sites are WordPress but hosted in a variety of hosting facilities with varying access (some cPanel, some Plesk, some have no panels), some on IIS, some on Linux etc., etc.

Currently we don't know of any plugin that can neatly do the following:

• Delete the local wp-content folder;
• Download the wp-content folder from live to backup on our local server;
• Backup the database and download the database backup;
• Restore the database by importing it into our local MySql;
• Do a test restore (e.g., query for the latest updates to wp-posts);
• Notify of backup and restore success or failure;

What would be the best way of handling this?

1. Find a plugin that can do it all (if so, which?)
2. Continue to do the above manually for all sites (very time-consuming, error prone)
3. Pay somebody to develop a script for each website individually?

Answer 1

wp-cli can do all you need from the list. This is an elegant way to work with WordPress. Furthermore, you probably need some bash scripting to automate things even further.

I would go with that. For instance.

Backup the database and download the database backup; wp db export it will export the database to a file. then you will decide where to put this backup and later you can download it.