WorpDrive News: The WordPress Backup and Recovery Time Machine

WorpDrive is a WordPress Backup and Recovery time machine.

WorpDrive will provide instant WordPress backup and recovery without the need for FTP/Dropbox/Amazon S3.

It isn’t released yet but it’s already proving popular – we’re getting a lot of questions from our users about WorpDrive – the most common one being: WHEN?

When will WorpDrive WordPress Backup and Recovery be available?

This is a difficult question to answer. And by difficult, I mean impossible.

You never know what hurdles you hit as you create a new product – iControlWP App had the same issues.

The WorpDrive product development is 90% completed – what remains is tying up the loose ends and running some thorough testing.

We would be surprised if WorpDrive wasn’t released by the end of July. It’s our hope to have it before then…

What can you expect from WorpDrive?

WorpDrive is completely different to traditional backup methodology – WorpDrive WordPress backup and recovery is cleverer by far.

Backup takes a fraction of the time and bandwidth, and is completely automated.

How do we achieve this?

The WorpDrive backup system approaches your website like a “work in progress”.

It will first take a snapshot of your site. Every subsequent backup is then a snapshot of the changes on your site since your last snapshot.

So if you don’t update any files, and only the database has changed (which is the majority of backups), a complete site backup will take seconds.

WorpDrive will run automatically each day performing a complete site backup – the only manual aspect to WorpDrive is the initial setup.

What are the WorpDrive system requirements?

One thing we have learned clearly from iControlWP is the sheer amount of distinct system configurations.

The reality is this: not everyone will be able to run WorpDrive.

Why? There are two main reasons for this:

• you have an old system and you don’t have certain libraries installed
• you have, or your web host has, “locked down” / “secured” your system too much preventing access to certain functions

We have created a simple tool to help you discover whether your sites are compatible with WorpDrive.

From within iControlWP:

For each site, you can then see whether they are compatible (with a green tick) or not (grey orb).

For further details on incompatibilites, click the ‘Manage’ button for the given site and browse to the ‘WorpDrive’ tab.

The screenshot below gives an example of an incompatible site:

• Fail Test 1: Because the site is on Windows web hosting.
• Fail Test 2: exec() function in PHP is disabled/restricted
• Fail Test 3: there are restrictions in place to prevent writing to disk
• Fail Test 4: the command ‘du‘ is not found in the PATH so we cannot calculate disk space usage
• Fail Test 5: cannot run mysqldump command so we can’t backup your WordPress database
• Fail Test 6: SVN (or GIT eventually) forms the foundation of WorpDrive – if the libraries are not installed or are restricted, WorpDrive cannot run

If your site fails any of these, you will have to configure your server or ask your web host to permit these.

If your web host doesn’t help you, consider changing hosts…

We have used Hostgator a lot and it fully supports iControlWP and WorpDrive – Hostgator hosting:

• runs PHP 5.3+
• has MySQL 5.0+
• permits exec
• has GIT and SVN libraries installed.
• is cheap, and just works.

Hostgator shared hosting runs into its share of performance issues, but that’s shared hosting by-definition.

Pricing: WorpDrive WordPress Backup and Recovery

As we have made clear, WorpDrive will not be free.

If you want free, you’ll have to find a traditional backup service, of which there are countless to choose from.

WorpDrive, because it’s a littler cleverer than normal backups needs a fraction of the disk space compared to normal – so you don’t need GIGs of disk space.

We have yet to finalize the pricing, but we believe based on current disk and server usage costs, 1~2GB of backup disk space would cost between $5~$10/month – with a small per-site license.

We may introduce a starter package for much smaller sites, but we will let you know once we finalize this. And of course, the diskspace will scale-up also if you need more.

Questions, comments and feedback?

If you have any questions about WorpDrive WordPress backup and recovery, please feel free to drop us a mail, or better yet, sign-up using the button below and test out your sites yourself.