Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an online data storage web service. The good thing is that it provides 99.99% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year which means it is very reliable and can become a good choice to backup WordPress. In this tutorial, you will learn how to automatically backup your WordPress site to Amazon S3. You only need to configure it once and then it will automatically backs-up WordPress to Amazon S3.
Signing-up with Amazon S3 Cloud Storage
Head over to Amazon S3 and click on “Sign Up Now”. If you already have Amazon account, then you can directly login using those details and if you don’t have Amazon account, then create a new one. Once account is created, you will need to enter your credit card details. Don’t worry, Amazon won’t charge you anything at this stage and that’s because Amazon offers free usage of 5 GB of storage, 20,000 Get Requests, 2,000 Put Requests, and 15GB of data transfer out each month for one year. This storage space would be enough for most users as they won’t be exceeding this usage tier.
Once signed-up, go to the “Security Credentials” page. From here, note down your “Access key ID” and “Secret access key”. Click on “show” to show the secret access key.
Configuring “Automatic WordPress Backup” Plugin
Now its time to install the Automatic WordPress Backup plugin. Go to Plugins > Add New and search for this plugin. Click on “Install” to install this plugin and then activate it.
After activating this plugin, you will see a new “Volcanic” menu option in your WordPress Dashboard. Click on it to configure this plugin.
This is the only page that you will need to configure. Enter the AWS Access key, AWS Secret Key and select the S3 bucket name from the drop-down or create a new bucket. Buckets in simple sense are a container for your files which stores data.
From the Backup schedule, select your choice for scheduling the backup to daily, weekly or monthly. You can also select “Disabled” to disable automatic backup but if you do so, then you will always need to take manual backup by clicking on “Save changes and backup now” button.
Select which parts of your blog you want to backup. This plugin can backup config file and htaccess, database, themes, plugins and uploaded content. Just check mark all options which you want to backup. Also you can check mark to delete backups older than one month or one year.
Finally, select the “I’ll show my support by writing a review of the plugin when I’m ready” option and click on “Save Changes” button. If you also want to take a manual backup, then click on “Save changes and backup now” button.
Once your backup is created, you can manually download the backup directly from this page or from Amazon’s AWS Management Console.
This is really one of the most convenient and time saving method to backup WordPress automatically to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage. The plugin is free and works great when tested on a live site. It created backup within a few seconds.
Also read: How to Backup WordPress from cPanel
This seems like a great plugin – thanks for the recommendation. I’ll be looking into this.
Worse feeling ever – losing everything, all the work you’ve done, the time and effort you’ve lost…that’s enough motivation for me to go out there and find ways to protect my content which includes decent privacy and security measures as well as back ups, like you mentioned. I guess I am conscious online ?