iDrive for Wordpress is a Worth a Look

I recently came across a post on Weblog Tools Collection about a new plugin for Wordpress from iDrive. The cloud storage solution company is providing a free service to Wordpress owners to backup their site files along with their database files, up to 2 GB, for free. Install the plugin from the Wordpress.org site and you have a great backup and recovery strategy that works entirely behind the scenes.

After you install the plugin, create a new account with iDrive for your site backup and the plugin will backup everything for your site on a nightly basis at 12am. The process limits the amount of data sent at one time to not interfere with the normal operation of your site. And each subsequent nightly backup is an incremental backup, only the changed files are transferred. You can request an email be sent to an account when the backup completes and snapshot restores are provided.

Snapshots are site images for each of the last 10 backups. If you want to restore your site to the configuration you had three nights ago, you can easily do this with iDrive’s snapshot feature.

I tried out the service on one site to make sure that there was no interference with operation. The only issue is the number of files reported as part of the backup initially and the number of files that are backed up when the process ends. For some reason these two numbers do not match as reported on several other reviews. Yet all the files from the site are backed up.

If you hosting company reports a spike in CPU usage from the cron job during the backup process, you will need to switch to a different backup solution, but I did not experience this with my hosting provider.