I have looked at lots of different back up systems but cannot find any that suit my pocket (not spending more money till site pays for itself) and patience.

Current plan is to back up to external hard drive, duplicate back up and then redownload after changes telling Filezilla to only download/overwrite new files.  Then duplicate that and repeat.

Does this sound reliable?   I have already downloaded to one hard drive and am downloading again (with lots more images added) to another one at the moment with full backups.

This just leaves the MySql backup.   I have four of these (maybe for my three wordpress installations and a spare)  does anyone know how can I tell which one goes with my main symbiostock site?  (I also have test symbiostock site)

I could not find that file but worked it out by going in and finding the list of users

Next problem - all I want to do is make a back of of mySql - not learn a whole new language - hot backup, warmbackup, cold dump ??
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-backup-excerpt/5.5/en/backup-methods.html

Maybe I will have to trust the Justhost on this one and use their version
~~

Just finished downloading so about three hours to download all files recommended by Shazam - now I have it twice on different drives I feel a little more relaxed about it

I have looked at lots of different back up systems but cannot find any that suit my pocket (not spending more money till site pays for itself) and patience.

Current plan is to back up to external hard drive, duplicate back up and then redownload after changes telling Filezilla to only download/overwrite new files.  Then duplicate that and repeat.

Does this sound reliable?   I have already downloaded to one hard drive and am downloading again (with lots more images added) to another one at the moment with full backups.

This just leaves the MySql backup.   I have four of these (maybe for my three wordpress installations and a spare)  does anyone know how can I tell which one goes with my main symbiostock site?  (I also have test symbiostock site)

Why don't you just use the backup options via SSH as described here?
I'll actually update this article today since you don't even need a WP plugin to backup your database via SSH very easy and fast.

Mostly because I did not understand it, terminal app and unix shells are not in my vocabulary and I have reached the stage where things need to be easy to understand so I can get on , without spending a few days learning a new language before I can start 

I agree. Messing around in terminal is dangerous if you dont know what you are doing, and i dont. I have used it for simple commands, like changing host files, but prefer to find another way to do things.

OK, understood. But it's really simple and I've just updated the step by step tutorial. If you follow it exactly, you can't do anything wrong. And it's less than 5 minutes of work.
If you're not on Mac but on Windows, then you don't have the "Terminal" app. You can use Putty instead.

I will look through it tonight. I am looking for a simple, fast way to back up, so its worth a shot. Thanks for putting the time into it!

I've used Updraft Plus on a different site and it seems to work very well. It ties in with a Google Drive automatically. I just checked my own Google drive and I get 15G for free, and 100GB is $4.99 a month.

I'm going to set that up now and see how it goes!

Steve

No, I don't think that is right. I'm setting it to back up my entire site daily, and keep one additional version, and then separately to backup the database on a different schedule - perhaps twice a day.

I've just gone through the setup to Google Drive - it is OK if you closely follow the instructions AND open the instructions and the API to Google Drive in separate tabs (right click to do that)

Steve

I've used Updraft Plus with the More Files addon ($15; this lets me include other files and directories so I can get the symbiostock_ stuff) and it seems to be working OK with my setup - Bluehost and Dropbox for the cloud storage.

I haven't tried the scheduling (I just did the "backup now" option), but I did download one of my zip files and unpacked it to be sure that the files were intact. I made a summary of the log file entries to cover the interesting bits in case anyone wants to take a look:

http://digitalbristles.com/temp/UpDraftSummary.txt

I had the chunk size cut down to 400MB for each .zip file - the default is 800MB - because yesterday's trial run took forever, I think because the process got killed a lot and had to restart, and Dropbox kept stalling or throttling or something. I can't see any major downside to smaller chunks and if it increases the likelihood of both my host and my cloud storage being happy, then that seems like the way to go.

There is an option to encrypt the backup with a phrase of your choosing, but I didn't see any need to encrypt this.

One other note: when talking over my strategy with someone else - asking if there was anything else I should be thinking about in planning how to do this, a couple of key points came up. The biggie was that wherever you place the backup files, (a) should be somewhere other than your hosting company for the site and (b) should be one of the major cloud storage vendors, or some company with enough of a track record that you trust them to be there - and your files to be there - should something go amiss.

I looked at amazon s3 (and a couple of their partners) and Google's paid cloud storage, and the pricing is so complicated (storage, plus bandwidth, plus fees for access) that I can't be dealing with it. I need to know what I'm going to pay.

I may grab a copy of the zip files for local storage on an external drive on a shelf at my house as well (at least once the site is set up).

I set 2 copies of the backup as how many to retain for testing, but I probably want to up that a bit once I'm really live.

I didn't use Google cloud storage (assuming that is a separate offering), just the google drive storage option that you probably already have if you use Gmail. I then extended that to 100G for $4.99 a month.

I need to get that extra plugin next to back up all the files as you have done.

steve

You're right - the complicated pricing is for their cloud storage. The Google Drive add on is a bit cheaper than the Dropbox add on, so unless there are any other gotchas with bandwidth or access, that might be the best deal. Both are supported by Updraft Plus

Hi Redneck

You are right - the basic free installation of UpdraftPlus does not copy the main folders that include our images (which is 10G on my site). You need to buy some add-ins to cover the remaining folders as jsnover explained.

The Google drive storage of 100G should be fine though.

Steve

I currently backup the entire Server directly into the Amazon S3 Cloud (using Virtualmin). Definitely cheaper than usual hosting storage and a full symbio site is too big to just download. This includes the databases, apache configs, php.ini etc. I am not sure if there are solutions for the Amazon Cloud if you use a webhosting package though....

Edit: ...found a S3 plugin for WHM users :-)
http://applications.cpanel.net/whm-s3-backup-whm-plugin-that-backs-up-your-server-to-amazon-s3/

Looking at the link you provided and then going to whms3backup, it appears that in addition to paying them for the cpanel app (35 GBP) you also need your own amazon s3 storage to store the backup? It's the uncertain and complex pricing model of buying amazon s3 storage that turned me off.

Did I miss something?

JS, many hosting companies hand out their webspace with a free (or included) cPanel/WHM license. Therefore I provided the link. If you got provided with another backend or installed for yourself another product you should check if there are solutions for you. Virtualmin is free and no plugin is needed for S3 if you want to go this route.

There is a pricing calculator for the Amazon cloud somewhere on their site. Currently it costs me about 10% of what a usual hosting company would charge me.

Hi JS

I bought the add ins (the full package!!) and installed nicely. When you selected folders, did you select the choice "Wordpress Core" and excluded WP-admin and WP-includes?

I think that choosing that option would pick up all the image folders.

steve

I picked WordPress Core and excluded symbiostock_xml_cache only. I am not very WordPress savvy, so I didn't know to exclude the other two, but I believe you can make a comma-separated list of locations. If you look at the text file I posted above it has all the directories it caught