I’ve been using BackupBuddy by iThemes for backing up my WordPress sites for quite a while. But did you know that you can do a lot more than just backup WordPress sites with BackupBuddy? Here’s a look at some more advanced things you can do with BackupBuddy. The ability to pull and push changes back and forth between sites can literally change the way you build and maintain your WordPress sites.

Automated Backup Schedules

BackupBuddy can do on-demand backups of your entire WordPress site or just your database. To make sure you stay covered, go ahead and setup a schedule so your backups are created for you automatically. You can (and probably should) setup different schedules for backing up your database and for running full backups for your entire site. To create your backup schedules click the schedules link in the BackupBuddy menu.

You will want to create two different schedules. A nice pattern to start out with is to back up your database every day, and do a full backup weekly.

In the event you ever need to restore your site, you will find clear instructions on the Restore/Migrate screen in BackupBuddy. I won’t go into detail on how to do that here, but it’s really easy and well explained both in the actual plugin and also in the
BackupBuddy Documentation.

Migrate Your Site

Sometimes you want to move a WordPress site to a different server with a different domain name. For example, maybe you want to work on some site updates but you don’t want to make edits directly to your live site. BackupBuddy makes it really easy to make a copy of your site on another server or even on your own computer so you can work locally. Whatever your reason for needing to move your site, BackupBuddy makes it really easy. It will rejigger all the database connection settings and the domain name references to work on your new server.

BackupBuddy Deployments

@Backup_Buddy deployments can change the way you build and maintain WordPress sites. Click To Tweet

This is where things really getting exciting! You may have already bumped into the Remote Destination settings when you were setting up your backup locations. I store my backups on Amazon S3. But, you can also set up a BackupBuddy Deployment remote destination so you can pull and push changes between two WordPress installations.

Suppose you have a copy of your client’s site on your laptop in addition to the live site. You can pull in a current copy of the live site to your laptop, do some work locally, then push the changes back up to the live site. Depending on what you’ve changed you don’t have to push the entire site back to the live server. If all you’ve done is edit some content in the posts or pages of the site, you can simply push the database changes up. That way you don’t have to wait for the entire site to upload. You can even choose which exact tables you want to push back up. For example, maybe you only want to push the posts table. That would leave any new comments in place that may have been added to the live site while you were working locally.

In addition to being able to choose database tables, you can choose to include all or some of your plugins, as well as your themes and media attachments.

Conclusion

In addition to providing you with the ability to backup and restore your WordPress sites, BackupBuddy is a tool that can totally change how you work on WordPress sites. Another really nice tool is WP Migrate DB Pro which provides the ability to pull and push databases changes (and media files with an add-on) between two WordPress sites. BackupBuddy take this concept further and gives you the ability to push and pull your plugins and themes too. The first time I did a site deployment with BackupBuddy it worked perfectly on the very first try. I literally said, “Wow!” out loud.

My first deployment with @Backup_Buddy worked perfectly. I literally said, "Wow!" out loud. Click To Tweet

If you haven’t already, take a look at Backup Buddy by iThemes. There are plenty of reason you will be glad you did.