Effortless Website Backups with Mover.io

The traditional way of doing a website backup is to download and save a local copy of the site files to your computer or to cloud storage services like Dropbox and Amazon S3.

But things get unwieldy when the size of the backup is huge. Hence a large internet data plan with fast downloading speed, and a considerable chunk of your time is required to pull this off.

I back up my WordPress blog and save it in a special bucket on Amazon s3. I must confess, the process isn’t fun. That’s why I searched for an alternative to automate the backup process and, after many hours of research and testing, I finally settled on a service called mover.

Introduction to Mover.io

Mover.io is a secure cloud transfer company that acts as a middleman between various web technologies that don’t play nice together. Mover takes your files from one place (internally referred to as “connectors”) and transfers/converts them to another while you have a cup of coffee.

Since it doesn’t run on your computer, it doesn’t use any of your resources — CPU, memory, disk space, or network bandwidth — to transfer the files. It supports over 20 connectors including FTP, SFTP, Dropbox, Google Drive, MySQL, Rackspace, and a host of others.

Mover gives you 2 GB free upon signing up and no credit card is required. You can view all the pricing details here.

Why Choose Mover?

I am quite sure a lot of us maintain accounts on multiple cloud storage solutions. Like the saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, it is important you save your website backup in multiple locations to be on the safe side.

Mover not only allows you to back up websites but you can also transfer the backup to multiple cloud storage accounts that you own without having to download and re-upload the backup.

Website Backups with Mover

Now that we’ve discussed a little bit on the features of Mover, and why you should use it, let’s see how we can use Mover to save a backup of WordPress to Amazon S3. With Mover, you can take a backup of not only your website files but also your database inclusive. Take note: Only MySQL databases are supported at this time.

To demonstrate how website backup is made easy with Mover, I will be showing you how I save a backup of my WordPress files and database to an Amazon S3 bucket. The backup will be divided into two processes: First the WordPress files, then the MySQL database.

We will be using the following three connectors for our backup process: FTP (used by mover to access website files in a server), Amazon S3 and MySQL.

WordPress Files Backup

When you first log in to the Mover interface, you’ll be shown two options: A way to select a “Source” and a way to select a “Destination”.

To create and send the WordPress backup files to Amazon S3, you’re going to add a “Source” in the form of an “FTP connector”. You’ll add your web server credentials to complete the connector options.

Next you’ll choose a “Destination”. For this, you’ll choose an “S3 connector”, adding your S3 Access ID and Secret Access Key to complete the connector options.

To initiate the backup, select the HTML radio button beside your WordPress installation folder and S3 bucket.

If you want the backup in zip format, tick the “Archive (Zip files before transfer)” checkbox. Finally, click the “Transfer Now” button or schedule the backup for later.

As soon as the transfer is complete, an email containing the migration details will be sent to you, as shown below.

MySQL Database Backup

Our WordPress backup isn’t complete without the database. The Mover IP address needs to be added as an “Access Host” so as to grant access to your server for it to connect.

On cPanel, for example, in the database section you can choose the “Remote MySQL” option:

Then add the Mover IP address as an “Access Host”:

Full details on backing up a database with cPanel and Mover are found here.

Now that access to our server has been granted, you can add a new “Source” and select “MySQL connector”. Then fill in the details containing your server IP address and port, database name, and DB username and password.

Select the radio button beside your WordPress database and S3 bucket.

Finally, click the “Transfer Now” button or schedule the backup for later.

Take Note: Mover creates a .dump file of your database backup, which can be used to restore your database in the future if you ever have problems. If you are using a tool like phpMyAdmin that accepts a database file with a .sql extension or a .sql file inside of a zip archive when restoring or importing a database, you’ll need to change the database backup from .dump to .sql — otherwise, an error will be thrown.

Conclusion

Once you have performed a first-time backup, your connectors get saved, so you don’t have to go through the hassle of creating the connectors each time you want to carry out another backup.

Mover is indeed a life saver. I no longer spend hours downloading and syncing my WordPress backup to Amazon S3.

If you’ve used Mover or if you’ve tried another service, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.