Typically most people use free (or premium) WordPress backup plugins that do 3 things:
- a mysql dump of your database
- zip up all your websites files (along with the database dump)
- copy the backups to your supplied FTP server, Amazon S3 account, dropbox, etc.
WorpDrive does things a little differently.
As you know, WorpDrive has 3 mains stages:
- collect your MySQL database data (currently using mysqldump command)
- checks your whole website for changed files and copies only those changed files to a temporary staging area
- commits your site and database changes to your websites backup (SVN) repository
This page is going to describe to you the storage used throughout this process.
The WorpDrive temporary staging area
This temporary staging area is the place where we replicate your current website.
We get the previous backup of your site from storage, and then compare every file on your website to the files on the temporary staging area, and the following happens:
- if there are any new files on your website, they are copied to the staging area.
- if the file on your website has been modified in any way (compared to the file on the staging area) we copy it to the staging area.
- if there is any file on our staging area, that isn’t on your website, we assume you’ve deleted it, and remove it from the staging area.
In this way, we create an exact mirror of your website.
We hope you can see from this that the time taken to do a backup of your site each time is tiny compared to making a zip of your whole website every time.
Where are the backup repositories stored?
We use a dedicated, non-public accessible file storage system. Once the site data has been downloaded, we package it up and store it off-server.
This data is not publicly accessible and may only be obtained with the correct credentials directly from one of our internal servers.
All data is stored in safe, secure platform with redundancy built-in to reduce file-system errors and corruption.
When a restore is requested, our servers download the data from this repository and make it temporarily accessible so it may be uploaded to your site.
