You never need a backup until something goes wrong. But when something does go awry, a backup point can be the difference between having to start over from scratch or just a few minutes of lost work (and it can eliminate a lot of sweating and cursing). Think of backups as an insurance policy: you hope you never need them, but when you do you’re really glad they’re there.
At WP Engine, we’ve offered automatic and on-demand daily backups of your production site since day one. And last November we made backup points more secure, started including the uploads directory, and made them available within EU datacenters. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that you can now get all of these awesome backup features on your staging site.
You can access your staging backup points by clicking the blue button on the right hand side of the ‘Backup points’ link in your user portal.
That’s right, along with automatic daily backups for your production site, we now backup your staging site too! This feature helps you easily restore sites that are in progress, so you don’t lose valuable work if something goes wrong. Staging backup points work EXACTLY like their production counterpart, in fact, they even have the same controls that let you add custom messages to your backup point, create backup points on demand, and quickly restore any backup. So no matter which environment you’re working on, you’ll always have a daily backup in case of emergency.
But that’s not all! We’ve also added a feature that will help you know who created which backup points. If you’re working with a team of developers, everyone can now easily see who did what and when. This helps you know which backup point you need to restore.
We hope you never need to use this feature; but we all know mistakes can happen. And when they do, we’ve got your back with staging backups!
Taylor McCaslin works as a Product Manager at WP Engine. He speaks at WordCamps and WordPress events around the country. WordPress has been Taylor’s platform of choice for over 5 years, he even paid his way through college by freelancing as a WordPress developer! When not creating products that captivate and delight, you’ll find Taylor geeking out with the latest tech gadget or experiencing the rich Austin art scene. Follow Taylor on Twitter @Taylor4484.
This is a fantastic development, thank you very much! We often use staging sites for big projects and it has been a real hindrance not to have backups, creating a lot of extra work. It will be great to know that we can now access the same backups system for staging sites.
We’re thrilled you are enjoying this feature Katie! Thanks for being a customer!
This is awesome. Thank you very much!
I was there waiting for this a long time, you are great!
Awesome! This is a very welcome feature. When using staging just for testing something, it wasn’t as needed… but when doing major renovations, this is quite important. I just spent a week or two working on a site in staging, just hoping I didn’t mess something up, or have an update cause an issue. This will make those kinds of fears history!
It will also be nice in situations where we have to setup a testing situation that breaks things, as we’ll be able to simply roll-back and tweak, and try again. Thanks!
need option to not include uploads dir like before
Fantastic! This is such a critical feature when developing on staging.