Website Backup System – Site Vault Review

If you don’t wake up every day thinking about what would be the result of the “worst case scenario” then you probably fall into one of the following categories:

• probably don’t have a successful website
• are naive and have never faced the inevitable computer related disaster
• have a great backup system already in place

For this site, since I know that everything I do or upload is already somewhere on my local system, then the occasional use of the WordPress backup plug-in is good enough. But for real business or a professional blog network, for example, that isn’t going to cut it.

When I first started the network and there were only 4 sites, I spent the better part of a day figuring out how to completely automate a backup system. It’s important to realize that these are sites where other people are uploading images and performing maintenance, so a database backup is not sufficient. I needed to grab the files in the FTP folder as well on a regular basis.

I went through all the hassle of setting up shell access, cron jobs, shell scripts and auto FTP batch files to login and download the backups to my computer. Like I said it was a big job, and every time I added a new site, it was a pain to edit all the files and update them to include the new site.

Important Backup Point

It’s great to have a backup system, but you MUST test it.

• Take a backup, preferably of a test site
• Blow away the site
• Restore it from the backup

Only then have you verified your backup system. You really don’t want to find out that every file in your database backup system is corrupted when you really need them to restore your site!

Over the Top

With the next round of 10 sites that I launched onto the network I decided to put them on a different hosting account, and the backup system I had for the first 4 sites wasn’t compatible. Ugh. The thought of redoing that effort was not very appealing so I thought, “somebody must have devised a good backup application for websites.”

Enter SiteVault

I believe I found it. After watching a couple of how to videos on their site, I was able to get a complete website back up [FTP and database] done in about 5 minutes! The next one took less than a minute.

How it Works

In SiteVault, you set up three components to create a full site backup.

1. The FTP Space: you enter the FTP address and credentials for your hosting account.
2. The site info: you enter the location in your hosting account of the folder you want to backup.
3. The MySql info: enter the sever address and credentials from your wp-config [for example if you are backing up a WordPress site]

The beauty of the way they have it set up is that you can mix and match these settings. For example, if you have 5 sites on one FTP account you only need to enter the FTP info once. Or if your site has 2 databases you can easily attach both databases to one site backup.

Scheduler – Automated Backups

It’s fine to have a sticky note on your monitor to remind you to run the backup on one or two sites, but when you have 14 or 20 you need a scheduler and Site Vault has a good one. You can set up each site to run a certain time, so you can spread them out during the day, so it doesn’t slam your bandwidth all at once.

Restore Your Site from a Backup

It’s as simple and right clicking a site and selecting “Restore” and the site, files and database, will be rebuilt in seconds from the files on your computer.

Other Features

Incremental backups. The first time SiteVault runs, it pulls down your site’s entire file system, but each time after that, it only backs up any new or changed files. This means that if you run it every day one your blog it will only get any template tweaks or images that you have uploaded since it ran the last time. These incremental backups are very fast and don’t waste either bandwidth or resources on your local system.

Support

As I often do before I purchase something online, I like to email support with a few questions to see how well and how quickly they are answered. I was very satisfied with the responses and the response time. My sense was that they are very sincere in wanting the best for their clients and this is exactly the quality I look for.

Limitations

Runs on .php and MySQL systems only.

A Couple Minor Beefs

The scheduler doesn’t run as a Window’s service, which means you need to be logged into your computer for it to run. Nothing serious but it would be nice if it ran in the background.

I tested it on Windows 2003 server and the scheduler didn’t seem to work well. I have contacted them and they promise a fix. It does run perfectly on my Window XP computer. Vista…who knows?

The program is very simple to use, but I think very inexperienced users would benefit from a more complete help file system. I like step by step, baby simple help files, but most people will do fine with just the basics which are covered in video and text based help files.

Not a beef really, but a killer feature that I thought of would be if you could take a backup and then upload or restore that backup to another site. This would allow you to make a copy of your site and then create a parallel test site to use for experimentation. I contacted SiteVault and suggested it as a feature, but they said it wasn’t in their immediate plans.

Conclusion

Site Vault was almost exactly what I was looking for to easily automate backups of my WordPress blogs. I now have this site and the 14 on my network in set and forget backup daily mode…which is a big relief.

Do you need a full blown site backup system?

Like I said, if I just had one simple site and I was doing all the work on it, then I probably wouldn’t bother with the system like this, although it is more convenient than just doing manual backups.

But if you have more than a couple sites and anything is happening on them that isn’t directly coming from your hard drive [user comments or forum posts for example] then you really should have some kind of automated backup system running.

A couple other reasons to use an application like SiteVault:

1.) you’re doing a WordPress upgrade, especially a major one, you take a backup before you begin and if the upgrade fails, you can restore your site in one click.

2.) You are a designer or developer and you are expected to keep a backup of your clients sites.

Site Vault was the best and easiest website backup I could find, so you may want to check it out. There is a free, fully functionality 30 day trial available. So you can take it for a thorough test drive before you need to purchase.
**Long time readers will know that it’s my policy to put up affiliate links only for products or services that I actually use and sincerely recommend.

How Paranoid Am I?

If you really want to be a hyper prepared good boy scout, you can take your backup system one layer deeper. I have an 80 gig tiny portable hard drive. Once a day, I load all the website backups [and all the other important files from my computer] onto it. I carry it with me at all times!

Now if I arrive back home and my house has been nuked or burned to the ground, I can have my business operational again in a couple hours – even if my hosting company’s data center has been nuked at the same time!

It’s crazy to think like that, I realize, but stranger things have happened and when your entire business is based on a tenuous arrangement of magnetized grooves on a slab or two of metal, you can never have too much backup.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.