Backup

This article is a portal to various strategies and tools for backup of data on your DreamHost sites.

Automatic Backups
Dreamhost automatically backs up files in your domain. See Domain Restore for details.

Manual Backup Techniques

 * [[Image:One-click-backup.png | thumb | One Click Account Backup]] One Click Account Backup. This feature lets you download all the data in your account, including all users, mailboxes and databases, in a series of .zip archive files. The backup will skip users that are larger then 4 gigabytes. You will need to manually back up the site using FTP in that case. Try  to compress the entire current directory,   to download the file to your local machine, and   if you need to resume an aborted transfer. Use   to compare the files and make sure everything made it over.
 * A newer Python script to backup your account via DreamHost API
 * For MySQL database: Backup MySQL, Restore SQL backup and Migrate MySQL
 * For website files: Backup Website Manually
 * For MediaWiki sites: MediaWiki/Backing up a wiki
 * For email Backup Email to Your Computer

Offsite Backup Techniques

 * Rsync Backup
 * Automatic Backup, a technique for having the system automatically generate and tarballs of the automated domain snapshots and recovering them to the your machine by FTP.

Personal Backups
see Personal Backup, a service provided by DreamHost for backing up your personal computer files to your DreamHost account.

What is not backed up
(It would be good to describe what data is not backed up. See discussion page.)

WordPress Backup
There are many popular plugins to use for backing up WordPress. You can store your backups on DreamHost, Amazon S3, DropBox or even DreamObjects. Whenever possible, it's wise to limit the number of backups to a reasonable amount, as infinite backups can cause performance issues on your site.

Suggested Plugins:


 * DreamHost WordPress Backup - Written specifically to work with the DreamHost Backups User and offers a "Download local copy now"!
 * DreamObjects Plugin - Written specifically to work with DreamObjects!
 * BackupBuddy
 * VaultPress