WordPress is a great platform for websites but can be surprisingly delicate. Besides the obvious danger of being hacked, there is the danger of lost or corrupted data. Potentially it could bring down the site. This is why you have backups. Many hosting services do this for you, sometimes daily, most often weekly, it can vary from host to host. This is good, but like the song says “God bless the child that’s got his own”.
This is especially true when working in a development site, where you’re creating a site before making it “live” on the web. Setting up a backup plugin means you can manually save your work as you go; several times a day if needed. Because you’re working remotely, an interruption in your service could corrupt a database. Recreating even a page can be a real pain, recreating a site can be a disaster in time and expense.
I have been using UpdraftPlus (free version) with Google Drive. Set up a new gmail specifically for this – the 15GB Google Drive space that comes with it should be enough for several backups.
Set up can be a bit difficult but it’s really just following direction. Get the plugin by going to Plugins / New in the dashboard and searching for UpdraftPlus. See here – https://updraftplus.com/support/configuring-google-drive-api-access-in-updraftplus/ for setup instructions on updraft.com or, if you prefer, watch a YouTube video here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5KpzzYHzgE .
You will have to access the Google API ( Application Programming Interface ) Console ( login with your gmail and password ) which you can do here – https://console.developers.google.com/project/_/apiui/apis/library but go through the directions first.
Like drive images, you’re never really sure they work until you have to use them – and we hope we never have to. But having them can save you a lot of aggravation.
