I’ve been using duplicity to backup my personal WordPress website’s wp-content folder for a month and I love this new process.
Duplicity is a Linux terminal backup application that you may know by its Gnome desktop client Deja Dup which I also use to backup my computers.
My backup workflow
I backup my WordPress database daily using MySQL and bash
It quickly creates a snapshot of the database but I needed an efficient way to manage my wp-content folder where WordPress saves all my themes, plugins and media files. This is where duplicity comes in.
While logged into my website via ssh I use a simple command to create and update an archive of my wp-content folder and save it just out of public reach.
# duplicity /home/linuxboo/public_html/wp-content/ file:/var/www/backups/Note: My website’s setup uses /var/www/html as the public folder and /var/www/ is not shared by my apache web server.
Duplicity quickly updates a snapshot of my wp-content folder.
As you can see above, the archive is 649 MB but nothing new was added since the last backup a few minutes earlier. This is key, only changes are recorded and it doesn’t duplicate files that haven’t changed.
In practice I run a duplicity backup every time I perform a database backup. This allows me to restore static files along the database.
Duplicity would have been perfect for restoring that plugin I deleted six months ago ::smh::
Joseph Dickson – a month ago
Why I Love Duplicity
A few months back I had deleted a WordCamp slide presentation that accompanied my session on WP_Query. I didn’t have this workflow in place and it would have saved me a lot of time. I could have simply restored the missing files along with the database to my local testing server.
As duplicity’s archive grows I will probably prune it along with my webhost’s log files to keep my Ubuntu droplet nice an lean.
Over the next few months I may even go as far to run a cron job that updates the duplicity backup and the WordPress database so all I need to do is log in to download them. 😉
Offline and Duplicate Backups
Below is an example of an local archive I earlier today which includes the duplicity backup, MySQL database, wp-config.php and .htaccess that can be used to clone or restore my website at another location. 😀
Most importantly I can store this on my desktop where I run daily backups and copy it to a USB flash drive in the event my webhost, computer crash on the same day I’ll still have a third offline backup.
Why Backup Manually?
I wanted to take a more personal and intentional approach to backing up this website and canceled my Jetpack account a few months ago which provided flawless daily backups and restoration via VaultPress.
Jetpack has a lot of features I really didn’t use or appreciate so taking on the challenge of keeping my own local archive of my website seemed like a good idea. I now backup my website’s backups along with my desktop and laptop 🙂
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