Learn how to back up websites on xCloud by setting up complete server backups and individual site backups with remote storage. The guide covers scheduling full weekly plus incremental daily backups, choosing providers like Backblaze B2, and customizing settings per site.
Chapters
A super important part of having a website is backups. Making sure that if something terrible happens, you can restore your website to its former glory. Now, I'm going to show you how to do that on xCloud. Now, xCloud is a VPS panel as well as managed WordPress hosting. So we're going to look at backing up both of those things. The first thing we're going to look at is complete server backups. So I'm going to go to a server and then on the left there is a backup menu. Now, I want to be clear about what's, what's going on here. This is a complete server backup. That means the operating system. It means all of your web server and database settings, all of that stuff, in addition to every website on the server. Now, this is not something that you would use to restore a single website. You would use a website backup for that. This is if something catastrophic happens and you can you turn it on here, it costs a dollar and you can choose how often and a day of the week. Additionally, you can choose a specific backup time so that you know when it's going to happen. So like, if you have an event that happens on your server every day, you could either back it up right before or right after, or both. And then at the bottom here, it shows your backups. I only have one right now, and my disk usage is 7.81 gig. But the server itself is 25 gig, so it does reserve the space for the entire server. This is not something you're going to use all the time. Hopefully you will never need to restore this. It's like insurance. You don't ever want to use it. Something you might use more often is site backups. So let's take a look at those. Each site can have its own backup configuration, but you can create a template configuration that all sites can use. And we're going to start there. So under my icon at the top right, it says Topher's Team. This is going to be the name of your team. Could be anything. We're going to go to Team Settings, and then on the left, under global settings, we're going to choose Site Backup. Now, to be clear, this is not setting up the backup for any given site. This is setting up a template that your sites are going to use. Now you can set up both remote backups and local backups. I don't recommend local backups. That means that your backups are being stored on the same server as your site itself. And if something terrible happens and wipes out Your site, it throws probably going to wipe out your backups too, and that's not useful at all. That said, if this is your only option, it's an option. There isn't really a difference in how they work remote and local, except that with remote, you set up a remote storage provider. So we're going to start there and then we'll go through the other settings. So I don't have one yet. So I'm going to manage my storage provider in a new tab and I'm going to add new provider. Now, these are very common providers. They're basically just remote drive space and they vary in service, in options, etc. So we have DigitalOcean, Vulture, Backblaze, that's the one we're going to use. Google Drive is a nice, simple one. SSH is an option and that means that you just set up a server somewhere and enable SSH and it will back up there to your own system so you don't have to use one of these services. I'm going to choose Backblaze B2 and we go down and it wants these options. So I'm going to put in my bucket name and I'm going to put in a key, an application key and an endpoint and then hit submit. Now, you may be asking, how much is this going to cost me? Cost is going to vary dramatically based on provider. I chose Backblaze. I'm going to show you what we have. They offer $6 per terabyte per month. Terabyte is an enormous amount of space. That's a lot of websites, so it's not very much at all. So now we've got a storage provider set up and I'm going to reload this page and select my storage provider. And now my backups are going to go there. Everything else is going to be the same, no matter what storage provider you use. So backup types, there's full and incremental, and quite honestly, you're going to want both. And I'm going to tell you why. A full backup backs up everything. So all your posts, pages, database, the whole nine yards. So we're going to turn that on and we're going to choose to do that weekly. Now, an incremental backup only backs up what has changed since your last backup. So your incrementals are going to be much, much smaller. So we're going to choose. You could choose 12 hours, depends on how often your site changes, but daily is probably fine. So every day you back up what has changed since the day before, which May be nothing, but it's not going to back up everything, which would be much, much larger. But you do want to back up everything once in a while. So we do that weekly. So to be clear, backup type, I choose incremental and we still get a full backup weekly and then we get incremental daily. Then we have a choice of database backup. I can't think of a reason why you would not want to do this. You should backup your database. Then we have file backup and of course you want to back up your files. Now you may want to exclude some things from your backups and this is where you could type those in. You may want to get rid of, get repos, node modules, default WordPress, stuff like WP admin, WP includes. Those are things that are easy to restore from a new a new install because they don't change, you're not going to change them. But you can put anything in here that you need to. And then you know, I'm going to hit save settings. And you can see here at the top that I have two total sites. They're on different servers. This is important. One with backup configured and one without any backup at all. Now that one that has backup configured has local backups. And now that I have remote set up, I want to use that. So if we go to the bottom here, you can see all my sites. I have two. It's not uncommon for there to be hundreds of sites here. And so right now I have all you can see ones that have remote setup, which is none. There's the one with local and there's the one with no backup. I'm going to go back to all sites and then no matter which of these things you choose, you can select right here and select all of them, or I mean, you can do individuals if you want, and then go to apply backup settings. And now this template has been applied to all my sites. So but again, this is a template. So if you come back in here and you make a change, for instance, if you add an exclude path, then you'll want to go back down here and apply it to all of them. But this is an easy way to get everything standardized, all using the same settings, all using the same bucket, etc. So now that we have our global settings set up, I want to show you what it's like to manage an individual site. So under sites here at the top, I'm going to choose this one, and on the left there's site backup. So here are where you would find previous backups. Now I don't have any. There's local, there's remote. Because I just set this up so I don't have any backups. But if you made them, they would be right here. And you can just simply click to restore. You go to Backup Settings. This looks exactly like the template. Because it is exactly like the template. There's a couple of things that are different. For example, there's automatic delete. So, for example, you can delete after 30 days. Rather than keep backups forever and ever, which you probably don't want, you can just delete them after a while, but everything else is the same. But this allows you to make custom settings for one site. So, for example, if you have a site that basically never changes, it's a brochure, you don't necessarily need a weekly backup of it because it's going to be the same every week. You can come in here and make your automatic full. Your. Yeah, your full backup be monthly. And you could theoretically just turn off incremental if you want. I'm not going to do that for this one, but you could. The point is that you can make individual changes for individual sites. So let's summarize real quick. You can go to any individual server and go to backup and configure backups for the entire server, the operating system, everything, every website. Then under teams, team settings, global settings, site backup, you can configure a template for backups for all your sites. And then within individual sites, you can go to Site Backup Backup settings and make a custom setting for an individual site. So hopefully that helps you get your backups set up, because they're important. Don't forget.
