Upgrade WordPress: Backing up the right way

  • I recently got access to a site that has been inaccessible to my company for a few months. Over the course of these few months, the plugins started failing one by one. Essentially, I was wondering exactly what I would need to back up in the case of a restore.
    Information:
    Running 4.8.4, with ~40 plugins, about half have been deactivated. I have made a tarball of the entire System, home directory, and SQL databases. Uptime for my website is imperative, as I will be moving a localhost install to the website over the course of the week, I need to ensure that a rollback can be possible. I have tested restoring from the home directory and SQL databases, yet saw no results (I created a page after I completed downloading the .gz s, yet the page remained after restoring). I have read the documentation provided by my host/cPanel as well as WordPress and did not find something I would consider encompassing of the entire scope of my question.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    It seems you’re comfortable at the command line. YAY!

    Backup:

    tar -c /path/to/wordpress |gzip > /tmp/thesite.tgz
    mysqldump -u root -p thesitedatabase |gzip > /tmp/thesite.sql.gz

    put those files someplace safe

    Restore:

    upload the files to /tmp on your new site
    cd /tmp
    gzip -d thesite.sql.gz
    (assuming database already exists)
    mysql -u root -p thesitedatabase < tehsite.sql
    cd /path/to/wordpress
    tar zxvf /tmp/thesite.tgz

    Thread Starter dragozir

    (@dragozir)

    I prefer CLI but I am new to this particular work environment which I hope explains my caution. Additionally I am the most experienced in web development which means any issues I run into will be my responsibility. Hopefully my host enables SSH sometime this year. Thank you for the help!

    Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    If you don’t have SSH / CLI access, use a good backup plugin. I like “backwpup”.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Upgrade WordPress: Backing up the right way’ is closed to new replies.

Tags