I had a bit of a disaster the other day – I went to link to a blog post from a few months ago and it wasn’t there! I remember writing it, and knew it had posted, because I remembered some of the comments from when it appeared on my Facebook profile. I then remembered that there had been some funny goings on with the WordPress Mac app, I’d had a duplicate post and deleted it manually. However now it seems like the duplicate had also been deleted.

Of course it was at this point I realised that my latest backup was a couple of months before the post and I couldn’t recover it from anywhere. I was particularly annoyed at myself because I have a thorough backup routine for my Macs and especially my photography work, yet virtually nothing for my blog. However, it was the kick up the backside I needed to sort out a decent backup routine for my blog!

Given that I was the weak link when it came to backing up my log I wanted something automatic, that would run regularly and email me when it had completed. As with most things WordPress, there seemed to be loads of plugins available, most of them paid services. In my research I’d read good things about UpdraftPlus, so was pleased to find their free option, which is more than powerful enough for a small blog like mine.

To see if it UpdraftPlus lived up to the hype, I downloaded it onto my WordPress development environment (Chassis running on my iMac) and had a play. Looking at the list of remote storage services Amazon S3 was the obvious choice, as I already use Amazon Web Services to host my blog. Knowing the basics of cyber security, I only wanted UpdraftPlus to have minimal access to AWS, I had got myself lost in a maze of IAM, S3 buckets, users, groups and permissions. I was on the right track but this post on the UpdraftPlus blog, told me exactly what I needed to do. The IAM Policy Simulator on AWS was also a huge help in making sure my policies were both written and applied correctly. I went for the maximum security option, which also gave me a chance to delve into the workings of S3, setting up rules to archive then delete the data after periods of time.

Once deployed and tested on my development environment, it only took a matter of minutes to get working on my live blog, giving me regular, automated backups. Now the only task left to do is do rewrite the post that got lost…