Duplictity & Deja Dup as my WordPress backup workflow

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 /var/www/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.

Not much has changed from a my last backup a moment ago

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.

Selecting a backup date in Deja Dup — Selecting a specific date to restore from my backups.

Restoring files in Deja Dup — Restoring this website’s wp-content folder to my desktop

Thunar file manager — My wp-content folder restored to my desktop

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 🙂

Joseph Dickson

linuxbookpro.com

Joseph Dickson is a WordPress Developer in Los Angeles CA.

2020-07-26 17:36:49Homepage Permalink

I finally decided to install 20.04 and test it out for a few days. I forgot how much I enjoyed the simplicity of the XFCE desktop environment. The classic quake inspired drop down terminal always makes me smile.

XFCE 4 drop down terminal terminal

If you’re interested in how to get the xfce4 terminal to work as a drop open keyboard shortcuts and add the following.

xfce4-terminal --drop-down

Then apply your favorite key combination, I like to use Ctrl + ` but you can pick whatever you like.

Current Status

Listening to: Sally Brown (Live 1997)" by "Bad Manners" on "Feel Like Jumping! Greatest Hits Live"