Accessing Backups

Category: Tutorials Last modified: November 22, 2023

One of the great features of your WordPress hosting account with Pressable is our automatic backups! Every site on our platform is backed up by us on the following schedule (when changes are detected):

File System: Daily at 00:00 UTC
Database: Hourly

Within the MyPressable Dashboard, customers have access to these backups and the ability to download them locally.

How to Access Backups

To locate your backups first navigate to your site settings page in MyPressable Control Panel and select the site you wish to access backups for, then click on the Manage Data tab:

There are two backup tabs, one for Filesystem and the other for Database. You can choose to download the Database and/or the Filesystem. After selecting the date and time, you can click on the Download button to get started:

Here is a quick guide on how to extract these backups.

Important Notice: Database backups happen hourly at the beginning of each hour, but may take some time to be available. If the database is large, it may take over an hour to be available and will not show as a restore option until the backup is fully available.

For Example: If the database backup started at 17:00 and the database size is large, it could take over an hour for the backup to be completed and available. In this example, it could be 18:00 or later before the 17:00 database backup displays as a restore option.

If real-time backups are needed, we recommend using Jetpack for that. All Pressable plans (excluding the Entry plan) include a Jetpack Security Daily license, which will give you access to real-time backups.

On Demand Backups

Pressable has an on-demand website backup feature, which can be accessed by going to the Manage Data -> On-demand Backups tab of an individual site’s settings:

Once an on-demand backup is ready, it will be available in the On-demand backups for this site section:

You will also receive a confirmation email to your logged-in user email address once the process of creating the on-demand backup is complete.

Important Note: You are limited to 3 on-demand filesystem backups and 3 on-demand database backups. If you reach the limit, you'll need to delete one before you can create a new one.

On-Demand Backup Lifespan

On-demand backups are automatically deleted after 30 days for the latest backup taken and 7 days for the oldest backup taken. The following explains how this works:

The first on-demand backup taken will be removed 30 days after it’s taken.
If a second on-demand backup is taken within 30 days of the first backup, the first backup will get deleted 7 days from when the second backup is taken, and the second backup will remain for 30 days from when the second backup was taken.
If a third on-demand backup is taken within 30 days of the first two on-demand backups, the original (first) backup will still be removed 7 days from when the second backup was taken, and the second backup will then be removed 7 days from when the third backup was taken.

If this timeline is confusing, each on-demand backup has a Details button that will show an Auto-delete on section showing the date and time (in UTC) that the backup will be deleted:

Delete an On-Demand Backup

To delete an on-demand backup manually, you can click on the Details button next to the backup you wish to delete, and then the Delete button.

Restoring to a backup

You can restore your site directly from the Backups & Restores tab. We have a guide on that here: https://pressable.com/knowledgebase/restore-a-site-in-pressable-using-the-automated-restore-tool/#site-restores

You can also do a cross-site restore, which is taking a backup from Site A and placing it on Site B. We have a guide on that here: https://pressable.com/knowledgebase/restore-a-site-in-pressable-using-the-automated-restore-tool/#cross-site-restores

You can restore your downloaded site files to your site by using SFTP. We have a guide on that here: https://pressable.com/knowledgebase/filezilla-sftp-securely-transfer-files/.

You can restore your downloaded database through phpMyAdmin. We have a guide on that here: https://pressable.com/knowledgebase/access-phpmyadmin-with-wordpress/

Request help with a restore

If you need the assistance of the Customer Success team in restoring one of these backups just reach out to us via chat or at help@pressable.com. We request that you provide any backups to us in the following forms:

You can upload these files to the ../tmp directory of your site here via SFTP.
You can provide a direct download link to your files via a service that supports this (e.g. Dropbox, AWS S3). A direct download link looks something like this – https://www.dropbox.com/s/xxx/mysitefiles.zip – showing the file name in the URL.
Please note that services such as WeTransfer, OneDrive, Google Drive are not suitable for this, as they don’t provide direct download links.

Jetpack Backups

These backups are independent of the Jetpack backups. The Personal plan and greater come with a Jetpack Security Daily plan, free of charge. The Entry plan only comes with Jetpack Free license. You can follow this guide to activate Jetpack on your site: https://pressable.com/knowledgebase/what-is-jetpack-security-daily-how-to-enable/. We recommend using the Jetpack backups for restoring the site to an earlier version.