WorpDrive WordPress Backup v2.0 – The Best WordPress Backup Just Got Better!

It’s been nearly a year since our WorpDrive backup service was released and we can definitely say without doubt it’s been a huge hit!

Every day we automatically back-up 100s of websites, big and small, mounting up to several hundred GBs of data.

Every day!

In June, however, we hit a snag.

It was a big snag… big enough to knock-off backups for everyone for nearly 5 days.

WorpDrive’s strength highlighted its greatest weakness

Any one and their pet dog can do a WordPress backup… but the key is daily, reliable, backup automation that works on practically any host – this is what WorpDrive was built to deliver.

WorpDrive’s strength lies in its automation and that it doesn’t run on your web hosting, but instead it runs off our servers.

The problem was our back-end storage vendor.  You see WorpDrive uses SVN repositories to manage its backups and when it’s all working it does it very well.  But our SVN storage vendor hit a serious problem with their vendor, meaning WorpDrive couldn’t store the backup data.

Since that incident, we have dedicated most of our time to planning, and putting into place mechanisms to avoid this failure happening in the future.

We needed a new storage system and we needed a vendor that was reliable, but at the same time cost-effective.

At the end of the day, if we don’t have a reliable storage system, we don’t have a service (and you don’t have backups!)

WorpDrive WordPress Backup v2.0: Out with old SVN

After the 5-day outage in June, we asked our existing clients what was most important for them in their backups. The majority of responses centred around:

• daily and complete backup automation
• test restores and file-change lists reporting
• WorpDrive can backup where no other can
• no backup size restrictions

So we set about redesigning WorpDrive to maintain these important qualities while improving its reliability, and removing dependence on complex systems.

As a result, as of v2.0, WorpDrive no longer uses SVN, but instead uses our custom built storage engine that manages each backup image.

It will still be differential backup as always, minimizing processing on your servers and your servers’ FTP bandwidth. That won’t change.

All that changes is that instead of using the more complex storage system, we will now use plain-disk based storage.

So what does this mean for you?

There are a couple of significant differences that this will mean for your backups:

No More Lifetime Backups

After we asked people what they needed most from WorpDrive, and not a single person said they needed “lifetime backups”. Not a single one.

That told us that we were serving a product feature that nobody cared about.  Instead, most people actually said a 1 week – 2 weeks backup window would be generally sufficient. So we’ll likely be providing daily backups for 1~2 weeks, and then extending in to weekly and monthly backups to accommodate longer term backup needs.

Much Faster Backups

When a WorpDrive backup runs, it’s differential – that is, it only copies the changes. The next step in the process is to commit these new changes to the dedicated SVN backup repository.

We have found with sites that measure in several Gigs that this can take quite a while, even though it is still differential.  Again, this is a failing of SVN.

Since we’re now backing-up to dedicated disk with v2.0 (without the complexities of SVN), backups will complete in a fraction of the time normally taken.  We have measured it to be around 5-8x faster.

More Reliable Daily Backups

Again, this comes down to the complexities of SVN.  With plain-disk based backups our repositories are more reliable by far.

Storing and reading from plain disk is easy.  It’s natural, and easy to recover from problems.  SVN is a complicated system to run and maintain.

When can you expect WorpDrive 2.0?

We hope to start phasing in WorpDrive 2.0 to our existing clients starting some time in mid-September.  We will notify existing clients when the changes are applied to their backup repositories.

This will of course be seamless and you wont notice any change in your backups and schedules etc.

Furthermore, depending on whether you’re using the WorpDrive Starter or WorpDrive Pro, you will have a different period of daily backups available to you.  This has yet to be finalised and more information of this will be released closer to the time.

Of course, if you have any questions, please feel free to log into your iControlWP account and drop us a message in the support centre.

Thank you!

We would like to thank all of our clients that stayed with us during the outage we had… we always appreciate your support and the trust you place in our service.