 Hello, everyone. Hi. Are we ready with the? Okay, great. All right. So good day, everyone. My name is Patrick Alexander. I'll be giving you a talk today on how to manually back up your WordPress website. It's called Don't Put All Your Plugins in One Basket. All right, let's get started. Has the website ever been hacked or compromised? Miraculously disappeared. Been shut down by a hosting provider for God knows what. Typically non-payment, but. All right, do you rely on plugins for backups? Anybody here rely on plugins for backing up your site? Okay, so essentially, the issue with that is not all plugins are created equal and not all plugins follow the conventions for building plugins. So everyone, I want to again, let's say a backup plugin with any rogue or random plugin you install may back up your site. They may destroy your site. And with that said, the next course of action would be to depend on your hosting provider for that backup. But how many of you know that most hosting providers only back up your site for one week? So you only get one week of backups. So if your site was compromised, way before that one week, how would you retrieve your content? So essentially, that's what this talk is about. I'm going to teach you in ten minutes how to have that one solid backup. As everybody I'm sure is familiar with his law. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong at the most possible time. So I'm going to just give you a brief overview of how your WordPress website is set up. It has a lot of moving parts. There's a database, there's an application file, application files, and your data files. So essentially, if you're going to back up your WordPress site you need to back up all these moving parts. So the first step in backing up your site is backing up your database. And this is a quick overview of how it's done. You log into the database, you select the database, you export the database, and you save the file. So the very first step is logging into your database. Most web hosting companies use phpMyAdmin. And that's how the typical interface would look. You would need a little bit more credentials. You could ask a hosting company for it. But typically it's in your wp-config.phb file. And that's where you'd see the database host. You would see the username and the password that you more Likely selected. So you can log in with phpMyAdmin Or any other database applications. And all you would need are the credentials. And when you log in, the first thing you do is you Identify your database. And you identify your database. You select the database. The next step is you pick the Export option here. And the first one right here. And you typically select all of these default options. But also select the custom default option. And you would export it. You save that file. You save that file in the desktop so you can retrieve it Later on. So now you have your database. You have a backup of your database. And something i failed to mention at the beginning. WordPress is what is called a database driven application. So most 99.9% of your important information is Solid database. So you really want to have a copy of that. So after you backup the database, the next step is to Backup your files. To do that, you use an ftp Program. The most popular open source Free one is filezilla. And this is a quick overview. You would ftp into your server and download your files. So this is what a typical filezilla interface would look like. And you essentially, when you log in there, the same thing. You would need to put in the protocols to log on to the host. So you would need the host server ftp access. So that url. And you would need your username and password. Again, if you don't know what it is, you can always contact your host. And it should be able to give that to your host provider, your hosting provider. So after you logged in to your, to your, sorry. After you log in to your server, you want to identify where your files, You want to identify where your files are. And typically when you log in, you would get to your web directory. And your files would normally be named after your website name. So if your website is www.mywebsite.com, your directory would be www.mywebsite.com. And what you would do is you'd right click on that file. You'd right click on this thing on the directory and select download. And you'd store that on your local machine. Either desktop or your documents. And you download the entire folder because you want all the files. And when you download the entire folder, you would, it would have Both your application files and your upload and your data files. And typically your data files like your PDFs or any files you Uploaded in your website, your media files, they would be in the uploads folder. So if you, essentially the uploads folder would be the most Important folder in that structure, because it's what has Your actual files. Other files, you could get it from Any WordPress installation of that same version. All right. So the next step in this process is to restore Your database. So your site gets compromised. You can't access, you can't access any of the original Content, but you do have that one manual backup that you made. So the next step is to do the reverse of what we just did. So you're going to, the first step is to restore your database. As previously shown, you log on to that. You log on to phdmyadmin or the application that you're using. You select your database. And the key is to drop all the tables. And the reason for doing that is to avoid any conflicts that may arise. So if you have a, if there's existing table and existing Content, when you're trying to import, it will give you error, Error, error, error. So to avoid that, you're going to import All the original content, so you drop all the tables. Not a database, just the tables in the database. And one more thing to ensure that the database is, the database Name is the same name as the one that you're going to import. So once you do that, you click on import. It's very intuitive. It's right there on the menu options. And you select the file that you saved, and it then hit go. And that's it. So in order to restore your database, You need to restore your WordPress files. Okay? And then the same thing. You open your ftp to your Silver, right? Using, again, Firezilla. And you hit the reverse of what you did before. So right now you're going to get the files from your local Computer, and you're going to push it to the host. So from your local machine, you right click, upload, and you Push the content to the server, and you want to tell it to Overwrite anything that's there, because you want the original Content that you had before. And that would be it. So the next step is to actually go to your domain.com to Verify that everything is back up. All right? And the key is seen as believing, but knowing That everything is best. So the same thing. If you have that back up, but you still want to verify that it is Good, you can also restore it in a temporary environment. Even before anything happens, you can restore your site when The time comes, because that time typically comes in a crucial moment. So you have to verify that this can be done. One strategy. I'm not sure what the You are. You could set up a virtual machine on Your pc or your mac, and a popular virtual vm is virtual Box, or if you're using mac, you could use vmware. Another strategy you could use on this platform, it's Called wbco.com. It's a platform that my company Created. You could always go on there and Select a free stage environment to test this out. Or get a few more tech savvy on your local machine, on a windows Machine, you can use wamp on a mac machine, use mamp, and Then you follow those steps that we had before. In a nutshell, it's really not that complicated. It's only complicated because you haven't done it before. So advise you to try it. And here's my contact information. If anybody asks, do we have any questions? So essentially what you're doing is when you do the application Backup and all that stuff, you're actually taking a snapshot Of your website at that moment in time. So that's the only thing i can mention. If every time you do a major update, you can always do the manual backup. And if you're very tech savvy, you can schedule a cron job to do that for yourself. So whenever you're doing a backup, you're taking a backup of that Website at an exact moment in time, without the update. So that makes sense? okay. Yes. Right. So with automated backups, you can use a cron job. So these steps, you would have to write a script to do exactly Some of those things here. Right? But you would have to do it Using a cron job. And what i will do, if you check Our website in the future, i'll write a blog post about how to do that. But this is the automatic backups happen with plugins. But as i said, plugins can crush your site. So you want to manually schedule the automatic backup yourself if You're that tech savvy. If not, every time you have a Major update on your site, you can go ahead and do this manual backup process. Any other questions? Right. So what you're doing is that, as i said, you're grabbing Exactly what's there. So if you notice, i didn't mention Go into the site and doing changing settings. So when you take a snapshot, you take a snapshot of exactly what's there. And a way to verify it is to, the step before, as i showed Is to set up a staging environment. You can use our platform. You could use all these steps. So if you want to get more involved, These are four or three crucial ways you could do it. You could be that tech person and set up a vm virtual machine Install a lamp stack and do the restore. You could use our platform. You could use MAMP or WAMP. But all is a little bit more technical stuff. You could Google how to set up these environments. And then you do that restore to verify exactly what you're saying here. But as i reiterate, when you do this backup, you're taking a snapshot Of exactly what's currently existing on your site. Any other questions? So essentially the rule of form is Anytime you install something on there That you cannot afford to lose. So you don't do it every time. Or if you want to schedule it every time, you can figure out How to do that script and that current job. Because that's really why you have some of the plugins. And the plugins that allows you to put them in dropbox and All that stuff, that's cool as well. But sometimes the overwrite one is already there. They keep it for seven days or how long you schedule it for. So that's just that one backup that you want to have. And essentially as i said, if you do that one major update, That's when you want to have that manual backup process done. Or figure out how to write a current job to do it how frequently you want. Yes. It will decide to be the same way. Is it the same way? Because if you notice, right, this is not Necessarily, even with perspecific. Because we didn't go and change any configuration. We chose the source, right? We chose the core files. We chose the database. We backed up the database. If you know your multisite database, you do the exact same thing. You know where it's stored on your host, right? You know the application files are the exact same process. So this is not a very specific WordPress site. It's specific to any site that you have online. But as long as you know where the source files are and the database files are, that's what you do. Any other questions? Okay, i'll be at the happiness bar and i'm out of time. Thank you very much.