WordPress: A Disaster Recovery Strategy

The infographic below describes a streamlined approach to WordPress disaster recovery that minimises the room for error, and maximises the chances of fully restoring a WordPress site under a wide range of WordPress disaster scenarios.

I’ve tested the approach against my own blog site and apart from a minor tweak of WP Super Cache, a WordPress caching program that works deep in the WordPress core, the whole restoration process went very smoothly. The longest part of the process was actually running the installation script to create the WordPress jail. Once I got into WordPress and installed and configured the UpdraftPlus backup/restore plugin, the actual restoration of the WordPress site happened very quickly.

The free version of UpdraftPlus works just fine for this. The only caveat is that you must restore the site to the same subdomain/subfolder structure i.e. you can’t in the process move the site from say site1.mydomain.com to site2.mydomain.com. While not necessary for disaster recovery, the premium version of UpdraftPlus will allow you to duplicate or migrate websites if you want this feature.

To set up UpdraftPlus to use FTP storage on FreeNAS/TrueNAS for backup, refer to the blog post WordPress Plugin: A Marriage made in Heaven for UpdraftPlus and FreeNAS. I’ve not (yet) described the restoration process, so I strongly urge anyone using this approach to test out the restore phase so that you’re familiar with this phase and to reassure yourself of the validity and integrity of the approach. You should, on a periodic basis, retest this phase.

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