1. Backup Your Websites Using ManageWP
Backing up your sites is an important part of managing your websites,
and ManageWP makes that job a whole lot easier. Having a good
backup process in place helps to keep your site secure. If the worst
should happen you'll always have a backup that you can restore your
site from. Without a backup you could have to spend days trying to fix
your site, spend hundreds of dollars on help to fix it, or even completely
lose your website.ManageWP protects you from that.
You can automate the process, and back up to a number of sources
including Dropbox and Amazon S3.
Let's look at how easy it is to back up your site using ManageWP.
Backing up an Individual Site
To backup an individual site hover over the site’s name and click
backup now:
A popup window will appear giving you some options so that you can
control your backup.

2.  Backup type - choose whether you want to backup your whole site
or just your database
 Number of backups to keep - you can keep between 1 and 30
backups
 Exclude files and folders - exclude any folders you don’t want to
backup
 Include folders - if you have other folders other than the core
WordPress folders tell ManageWP here
 No compression - if your site is too large and your backups are
failing check this box
 Optimize database tables before backup - check to optimize your
database
 Do not keep backups on this server - we recommend that you
keep your backups in a different place in case your server goes
down. If you check this box you should choose an external backup
destination
If you are happy with your settings you can click “Create Backup”. If you
are backing up to an external location go on to the next step.

3. Backup to an External Location
You can backup to a number of different locations:
 FTP
 Amazon S3
 Dropbox
 Email
You will need to have your login details for whichever service you
choose to use.

4. You can test your connection by clicking the Test Connection button.
This will help you to make sure that everything is working correctly
before you get started.
When you are happy click Create Backup..
Automating Your Backups
As well as backing up a single website you can create backup tasks.
You can create as many backup tasks as you want so if you want you
can backup your sites at different times or to different locations you can.
To create a backup task navigate to Protect > Backups and click Add
New.
a) Task Options
First of all, set up your options.

5. There are a number of settings you can choose here:
 Task name - give your task a name
 Task schedule - choose how often you want your task to take place
 Backup type - either back up your whole site or just your database

6.  Number of Backups to Keep - choose how many backups you want
to keep
 Exclude Files and Folders - choose any folders that you wish to
exclude
 Include folders - include any additional folders that are not part of
the WordPress core
 No compression - if you are having trouble backing up your site
choose this
 Optimize database tables before backup - this will decrease the
size of your backup
 Do not keep backups on this server - check this if you are backing
up to an external location
b) Choose websites
Choose the sites that you wish to back up, either individual sites or by
group.

7. c) Choose your backup location
You can backup to:
 FTP
 Amazon S3
 Dropbox
 Email
You will need to have your login details to backup to any of these
locations.
When you are happy click Save.

8. Your backup task is scheduled. Now you have regular backups and a
whole pile of peace of mind.
Failed Backups
Sometimes a backup can fail. There can be a number of different
reasons for this. Before you panic, check out the tips below.
File too big
Your site may be too big, or there may not be enough space on your
server for it. To check whether you file’s size is the cause of your failed
backup, run a database backup only and see if that is successful. A
database backup is much smaller, so if that works the probably reason
for your backup failing is your file size.
Try the following:
 exclude unnecessary folders from the backup (including backups
made by other plugins or anything else that causes the file size to
increase unnecessarily
 check the No Compression option
 Clean up your folders, removing any large files that you don’t need
any more
 Check your database for large unnecessary tables made by
plugins
Execution Time and Memory Limit
Failed backups can also be caused by an execution time or memory
limit that is too low. To increase your memory limit and execution please

9. contact your hosting provider to do this for you because a lot of
providers won't let you do it yourself. You can never be sure how much
will be enough but 600s execution time and a 256M memory limit is a
good start.
Insufficient Write Permissions
Your WordPress permissions need to be correct to perform a backup.
The correct permissions will depend on your hosting company. You can
read more about write permissions on the WordPress Codex.
If you need help with any of these changes you will need to contact
your hosting provider. You should ask them to:
 Increase your PHP execution time
 Give you access to the mysqldump command
 Give you access to zip and unzip commands
 Ensure that wp-content is writeable by your website
If none of these solve your backup problems, you can try asking
our support experts in the ManageWP community forum.