Author: Landon Baine

I’ve used the Duplicator Plugin for a while now after trying about every other backup method out there before finding what seemed to work best for me. This is also part of my backup and testing that I do for clients and on my own sites. Following is a quick explanation of how easy it is to do a quick backup.

After you have installed the Plugin you will notice a new menu item for Duplicator. Click that and you will end up at the Duplicator dashboard.

The first time you will see nothing but over time a list of old backups will grow. I tend to keep a handful of them as they are not very big but you decide what works best for you. To get started, click the Create Package button:

Which will pop up a new window:

Give the Package a Name, Notes if you want and click Create Package Set. Once this runs you will return to the Duplicator dashboard and should see your new Package in the list.

From here you can either do nothing and leave the backup on your server or click Package and download it to your computer. This I prefer as it gives me an “off-site” backup if you were to lose the server or something else catastrophic occurs. If you download the Package you will end up with a zip archive. Inside you will have all the WordPress files including your plugins, themes, etc. Also, a copy of the database.

So that’s all there is to it. From here I will test the backup locally to make sure it is 100% and save it. Obviously, if you don’t want to go through this yourself, feel free to contact me!