Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. This is designed to provide 99.99% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year. S3 can become a good choice for backup of WordPress site. In this step-by-step tutorial, we’ll learn how to create an account on Amazon S3 and how to configure “Automatic WordPress Backup” plugin to send backups to Amazon S3 account.
For every webmaster, its very important to regularly backup their sites. Who knows when the disaster strikes, its a good idea to always have backup ready. But doing backup manually can be a time consuming task, that’s where WordPress plugins can help us automate the backup task. Let’s learn how to schedule automatic backup to Amazon S3 cloud storage service.
Backup WordPress to Amazon S3
Head over to aws.amazon.com/s3 and click on “Sign Up Now”. If you already have an Amazon.com account, then there is no need to create a new account, you just need to sign in with those login credentials. After creating a new account, you’ll be prompted to enter Credit Card details. Don’t worry, Amazon won’t charge you even a penny at this moment.
Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive 5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, 2,000 Put Requests and 15GB of data transfer out each month for one year. If we compute it right, then we can come to the conclusion that in most cases we won’t be exceeding these limits. And even if we exceed these limits, we only pay for what we use, there’s no minimum fee.
Click on the activation link received in the email and we’re done. Now that we’re signed in, go to the “Security Credentials” page.
Note down your “Access key ID” and “Secret access key”. Click on “show” to know the secret access key.
Installing and Configuring “Automatic WordPress Backup”
In the next step, we’ll need to install Automatic WordPress Backup plugin. Login to your WordPress admin, from the plugins section, click on “Add New”, search for the name of this plugin and install it.
After installing, you’ll see a new menu below settings section, named as “Volcanic”, click on it.
Now we need to configure this plugin with the correct settings. Enter the AWS Access key, AWS Secret Key, S3 bucket name (if you don’t have any bucket, then you can also create a new one). Buckets in simple sense are a container for your files. Buckets store your data.
Configure other parts like backup schedule, which parts of your site to backup and lastly select on “I’ll show my support by writing a review”. If you don’t select this last option then plugin will automatically add a credit link in the footer section. So even though you’re not thinking to write a review of this plugin, just select this option.
This plugin can backup database, configuration file, htaccess, themes, plugins and uploaded content. You can select which parts of your site to backup. You can delete backups more than one month automatically, if you think that you’re using too many resources.
After configuring the plugin, click on “Save Changes and Backup Now”. Plugin will create a backup and then automatically send it to your Amazon S3 storage. You can also download recent backups from this “Volcanic” menu or from your AWS Management Console.
The plus point of using Amazon S3 is that it is scalable and you pay only for what you use, no other extra charges. Try out this method for WordPress backup to S3 cloud.
Also read: Backup WordPress to Dropbox
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