Backup standalone blog on Wordpress engine in Google Drive cloud

A decent blog these days is almost a necessity for any intellectual worker who is generally disrespectfully called "creole." If you are a hipster, creative designer, self-employed photographer-bomb, and so on, then you definitely will not get off with one facebook; you need your own website, and the website has its own blog where you post your creos and selfies in the evenings, as you sit there in Jean-Jacques after a hard day, all of them in checkered leggings and with a glass of celery smoothie. Lose a couple of entries - and that’s it, creative cried, goodbye mood!

And if you are a serious scientist, entrepreneur or journalist, then any of your blog posts can be, without exaggeration, priceless. That's why backing up your blog is a must in all respects.

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

• Mirror your blog and / or website;
• Transfer the blog to a new platform without using cryptic utilities;
• Make a copy of the blog for experiments with design or add-ons;
• Keep “hidden content”, that is, entries that are, 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 satisfy suddenly material and spiritual needs. If you suddenly combed your hands to change something, you just make a copy, then add or remove what you wanted, and do not worry about the spoiled impression of readers and subscribers. In any case, I was more than once pleased with my foresight, restoring the backups of the studio blog after design experiments ... And I personally prefer to store copies in recent years in the cloud, for example, on Google Drive.

Why google drive

The answer is simple: why not? The benefits of backing up to the cloud in recent years are pretty obvious. The cloud does not steal (unless you have compromised the password), it does not fall out of the pocket onto the pavement, it is not lost at the most inopportune moment in the chest of drawers; you won’t forget it on the table, leaving for Pattaya, Nice, the Bab el Mandeb Strait ... Viruses, lost clusters, mirrors, data synchronization, and the like, when storing data on a cloud account is a headache for a cloud service administrator, and by no means 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 maintaining and maintaining them (the so-called “total cost of ownership”).

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

Keep in mind 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 will be discussed mainly 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 one is on using an external utility that avoids working with Wordpress at a logical level. Both of these approaches have both advantages and inherent disadvantages; at the same time, the approaches themselves are not only incompatible, but, as scientists say, do not generate a synergistic effect, that is, they do not allow each other to be strengthened when used together. So, let's get started!

Using FTP to backup a blog manually

Let's be honest: a solution for masochists! The meaning is simple, like felt boots: the Wordpress directory is considered as a data store for FTP (SFTP, FTPS), it connects to it your favorite user FTP client and voila! You can pump data. You won’t copy the Wordpress database, only static content. Of course, everything is manual, and with a tambourine, with a tambourine ... I copied the blog to the Ubuntu cloud service in this way until I invented some automation. Automation, of course, looked nowhere simpler: the FTP client was launched from a console script, which, in turn, was controlled by the cron scheduler. Everything worked perfectly, I just had to be a little virtuoso of the console and bash, and at the same time work out the favorite thing for all Linuxoids: “smoke manuals”, as it is customary to proudly write on the forums. To tell,

Be that as it may, this option deserves mention. If you are a terminal god, a system administrator with a beard of the biblical patriarch, able to reload the switch at a glance, then this method is for you. But then, most likely, you don’t need to read this article either, and you and I will not be allowed to enter Jean-Jacques; and we’ll eat barbecue instead of smoothies. 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 smooth, but effective site administration, do not discard FTP and the good old cron scheduler from your accounts; more than once they will help you out 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 for standalone-blogs on Wordpress. To get them, you need to get into the Wordpress plugin settings in the administration panel and enter the name: Google Drive for Wordpress. Next, dances with a tambourine will begin, since you will need to create a GoogleID in the Google settings, as well as a project related to your backup. I hasten to please you: since you pulled the standalon blog and administer your personal site, you’ll somehow figure out the plugin’s settings. When done, set up a backup schedule; there are few options - with a period indicated in days, or manually (Days: None). Nevertheless, this is much better than the purely manual backup management offered by most plug-ins as for static ones,

This plugin will back up your blozhik, alas, from cover to cover (the so-called full backup –– full backup). No options to reduce the volume, such as incremental or differential backup, are not provided. This is very disappointing, because the real amount of storage space on Google Drive is by no means free, and the transfer of large amounts of blog content over the network also does not affect the performance of network applications in general. My resume: the plugin is very suitable for customers 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 the solution has attractive aspects in every sense, despite the minor flaws described above.

The described plugin is not the only one capable of working with standalone Wordpress blogs and clouds. There is, for example, an excellent and multi-functional Updraft Plus plugin, the premium version of which (unfortunately, is paid) allows you to, for example, clone and mirror blogs. All such plugins require some experience with Wordpress, but they are able to provide considerable workability in return.

Handy backup

I would be wrong not to include my favorite utility in the review. I must say that in the latest version she slightly changed the design, which is why the manual on the site has become somewhat unreadable; otherwise, everything remains the same, unless, of course, the list is counted in a dozen supported clouds, among which, of course, is Google Drive. The developers claim that access to the Google cloud is via the API, without the need for synchronization utilities or bridges, and I am inclined 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 method of direct access to the Wordpress directory. In addition, you can at the same time copy the database,

An important difference from crutches for manual work is a convenient interface that allows you to choose which data to copy and which are 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 made, and after it the specified number of differential ones, and again full); storing several versions, deleting old copies, scheduling with accuracy from minutes to months, restarting missed tasks ... The possibility of batch work is also 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 is that Handy Backup stores the copied data in the original formats, which greatly simplifies the work with copies if, say,

Summary: in terms of functionality, developers, as always, did not disappoint, but lovers of free solutions will not like this program. However, the price is quite high, given the lack of regular payments and commissions, and for lovers of freebies there is a simplified version that also copies FTP data to the cloud - alas, alas, only to Yandex.Disk. Of course, there are other similar utilities for backup; most of them are also far from free, and their functionality is very different and managed, unfortunately, not at a price.

Conclusion

It so happened that I often write here about backing up various data, and usually I come to some specific conclusion - which tool to prefer in certain circumstances. I must say that this time my instincts fail me. I installed Handy Backup on my own server (or rather, it already stands there for a long time, acting as a backup of all static and dynamic content), and for blogs that run several friends on web hosting, I recommended Wordpress plugins - and I did not lose! In a word, choosing the method of Wordpress backup on Google Drive is a classic task for “fast, convenient, free - select any two points”; I hope that my comments on the pros and cons of each option will facilitate this choice. I hope that your blog, protected from all contingencies, will one day become successful, and you will end up in Jean-Jacques, and even on the cover of Snob, with a glass of smoothie in his hand. And I have to go back to full-time photography of bears and barbecue in the open air.

See you!