Wpvivid

The backup you have never restored is not a backup

It is the uncomfortable line in this subject and worth saying at the start, because it separates whoever is protected from whoever believes they are.

Almost everybody has backups. They were scheduled once, they send an email every week saying all is well, and there they sit. What hardly anybody has done is take one of those backups and bring it back to life on a test server to check it works.

And the day it is needed is always the worst one: the site down, a client waiting and the growing sense that the three hundred megabyte file in your cloud storage might not include the database.

WPVivid backs up, restores and migrates, and all three are the same technology used at three different moments.

What the official licence covers

It does not unlock different code: it brings the updates from the admin and the maker's support, with activation on your domain done by the GPLClub team. On this particular product that weighs more than on others, because a backup plugin that fails does not announce it: it keeps sending its weekly email while generating incomplete files. Keeping it current, with an official support channel, is part of the insurance.

It pays on any site whose content costs money to rebuild, and above all on large ones, where half-finished backups usually die on the server's execution time limits: exactly the kind of incident the maker's support exists for.

What it does

• One-click backup and restore, of files and database.
• Migration between domains and servers, which is the same operation with a different destination.
• Cloud storage: Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3 and others.
• Automatic scheduling, with advanced options for what to include and what not.

For the neighbouring task of syncing development and production environments, which is a different job, members have WP Migrate DB Pro in the catalogue. The practical rule: backups for sleeping soundly, migration for working.

The destination being the cloud is not a detail

It is probably the most important decision in the whole configuration, and the one most people get wrong out of convenience.

Keeping backups on the same server as the site protects against your own mistakes: you deleted something, an update broke the site, a plugin caused havoc. For that it works and it is fast.

It protects against nothing else. If the server corrupts, if the host suspends the account over an unpaid invoice, if somebody gets in and encrypts the files, or if the provider has an incident, the backups go with the site because they were inside it.

Which is why the useful backup lives outside, on storage that does not depend on your hosting. It is a two minute setting and it is the difference between a bad afternoon and losing the business.

How to check it works

One. Download the latest backup and open it. Check the content folder and the database dump are inside. A file with no database is a photo archive, not a backup.

Two. Restore it in a test environment, not in production. It is the only test that counts.

Three. Look at how long you took. That number is your real recovery time, and it is worth knowing before you need it.

Four. Repeat the test periodically. Sites change size and what fitted a year ago may not finish now.

About licensing and the GPL

The code is distributed under the GPL licence and its use is free. Automatic updates and support are the maker's services and get contracted separately. They are not the same, and buying one is not buying the other.