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Wordpress Backup Plugins

May 14, 2009

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In the last few days the Gum­blar mal­ware injec­tion attack has been mak­ing the rounds and hope­fully you’ve taken pre­ven­ti­tive mea­sures to ensure that you are as safe as you can be from this annoy­ing injec­tion attack.

Just so you’re aware the rea­son for this attack is Black­hat SEO spam­mers are attempt­ing to insert a hid­den link on your site for the pur­poses of link build­ing. The prob­lem is it’s not only ille­gal, it’s incred­i­bly lame.

Here’s another sce­nario, let’s assume for a sec­ond that your site did in fact get hijacked. Likely what you will be left with is an annoy­ing script in a tond of your Word­press site pages. Not just in your theme but in any­thing beneath wp-content that they could inject.

This might include:

  1. Your theme files.
  2. Your plug-ins (a very good case for lim­it­ing and audit­ing new plu­g­ins you add).
  3. Your wp-admin files (this is extremely annoy­ing as well).

Your only solu­tion at that point is to rein­stall WP (thus over writ­ing the com­pro­mised files), re upload­ing your theme (backup!) and rein­stalling all of your plu­g­ins. That would then get every file restored.

Now that’s a time con­sum­ing and lengthy pain in the ass process to be hon­est. So let’s be a bit proac­tive and add some func­tion­al­ity to your Word­press site that will auto­mate some of these things for you.

Here’s a list of trusted man­age­ment, backup and reso­ra­tion plu­g­ins I use on all my sites:

  1. WP-DBManager — this is a great plu­gin by the pro­lific Lester Chan (one of my favorite plu­gin authors). It will let you do data­base work and back­ups directly from your Word­press Admin. Very handy.
  2. Word­press Backup — this is also a highly rec­om­mended plug in that will backup more than just your post data. Run it reg­u­larly and bet­ter yet, auto­mate it. My rule of thumb is that if it can be for­got­ten it will be for­got­ten. I’m the worst case of that.
  3. WP-DBBackup — this will help you auto­mate that process and keep a nice fresh copy of your data­base on hand for that dis­as­ter­ous moment.
  4. eFiles Backup — this is a good one for a smaller site. In gen­eral any injec­tion attack won’t hurt your data­base, just the con­tent files. This lit­tle guy puts your files on eFiles.com — I haven’t tested it but I might actu­ally give it a whirl.
  5. Word­press Auto­matic Online Backup — this is another promis­ing ser­vice which I have not tried out but am think­ing of giv­ing a whirl. Like I said automa­tion is key.

In gen­eral peo­ple do not like to think about things like back­ups. It’s not a very sexy sub­ject to say the least. But from my expe­ri­ence there is noth­ing worse than hav­ing to weed through a mass of files, down­time, and just the frus­tra­tion of repair­ing things.

These back­ups can make a bad expe­ri­ence like get­ting injected rel­a­tively pain­less. It’s a bit of a “set it and for­get it” scenario.

If this is your first visit here you might want to have a look at my other Word­press Secu­rity and SEO Posts

All the best,

Dan

In

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Related posts:

  1. Word­press Secu­rity Plugins
  2. Block­ing Spam with Wordpress
  3. Word­press Injec­tion Attack
  4. Word­press Exploit Gum­blar .cn

Written by Dan Nedelko · Filed Under WordPress 

Comments

11 Responses to “Wordpress Backup Plugins”

  1. Felix on September 9th, 2009 1:55 am

    I like the plug-ins and think they are really use­ful. But in my case I usu­ally use the back-up tools from the CPanel of my site to do the data back-up. Aside from that, I always make sure that my WP site is updated every time Word­press announces it. I also make sure that my local PC is free from any spy­ware or virus to pre­vent future infec­tions like the gum­blar. Luck­ily, I was not hit by this but some of my friend’s site were really hit badly by this.

  2. Dan Nedelko on September 9th, 2009 3:55 am

    I agree, a man­ual data backup (or even automat­ing it using a Cron job) from CPanel is a good way to go. The real inten­tion of the post is for those who want a word­press inte­grated solu­tion. Good points overall.

  3. blackhatguide on October 12th, 2009 11:07 am

    Awe­some blog mate! regards from Black­hat­Guide let me know if you want to part­ner up with my blog as well! =]

  4. Justin W on October 27th, 2009 6:57 pm

    Hey Dan, that WP-DBBackup is cer­tainly easy and handy too. Been using it for a while ^_^

  5. Dan Nedelko on October 27th, 2009 7:02 pm

    Hey Justin,

    Yeah it’s a fan­tas­tic plu­gin — it’s saved me a few times :)

  6. clavier arabe on November 4th, 2009 12:14 pm

    Awe­some blog mate! regards from Black­hat­Guide let me know if you want to part­ner up with my blog as well! =]

    thanks

  7. FTLwpress on January 8th, 2010 1:33 am

    installing these ‘back up’ plug in will just eat up space lol why bother? I mean, if you’re on a hosted site they got this back up but­ton ready for back­ing up in just a click :D

  8. Dan Nedelko on January 8th, 2010 2:00 am

    Well for a cou­ple of reasons:

    1. The abil­ity to backup directly from the admin panel (good for clients and one step back­ups).
    2. The backup util­ity pro­vided by host­ing com­pa­nies is not gen­er­ally auto­mated and sched­uled.
    3. Backup util­i­ties pro­vided by shared hosts (if that’s what you are refer­ring to) gen­er­ally do not backup your data­base and web­root at the same time. If you use Word­press (or any CMS) you are miss­ing half the equa­tion.
    4. These plu­g­ins backup every­thing you need for Word­press, wp-content and it’s chil­dren and the database.

    So yeah. Also keep in mind that these tools are intended for either clients or peo­ple who want to be assured their sites are backed up eas­ily and automatically.

    Nuff said (I think).

  9. turisuna on January 11th, 2010 10:32 am

    Thank you for this use­ful infor­ma­tion, I usu­ally backup my site man­u­ally cause I’m not good in tech­ni­cal things, this plu­g­ins infor­ma­tion help me so much, I will try it. Thanks for the sharing.

  10. Funny on January 28th, 2010 5:59 pm

    Hav­ing the abil­ity to man­age back­ups jobs from the Admin panel saves me from hav­ing to log into my server. Every lit­tle con­ve­nience helps.

  11. Nursing Home Abuse Center on March 9th, 2010 8:46 am

    This is a life saver the old meth­ods always were a pain to do. More so because i was back­ing up mul­ti­ple sites biweekly.

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