Migrating your website to Kyzoe.be

Backing up and restoring a WordPress site with Updraft

In this guide, we walk you step by step through the process of backing up and restoring your WordPress website with the popular Updraft plugin.

Making sure you have enough storage space for a backup/restore
Before you back up your site, you need to make sure you have enough disk space at the original backup location. You need at least as much free space as the current size of your website. For example, if your website is 500MB, you need at least 500MB of free space for the backup. Note that the backup files are in .zip format, but most of the files will not compress much.

Just as you checked for enough storage space for the original backup, you also need to check that there is enough space to restore the site at the new location. Again, this is the initial size of the .zip backup file plus the restored site. So if your backup is 500MB, you need at least that plus another 500MB+ for the restore.

How to create a backup

1. Log in to the WordPress admin area of the site you want to migrate.

2. In the left-hand menu, click Plugins, then Add New Plugin, and use the search function to look for ‘UpdraftPlus’.

3. Next to the “UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin” search result, click the Install Now button. It changes to ‘Installing’ and then to ‘Activate’. As soon as it turns blue, click Activate.

4. After activation, you land on the plugins page with an UpdraftPlus settings window; click the “Press here to start” button.

5. You now arrive in the plugin to make your first backup. Here you can use the tooltips to discover advanced features; for this guide, we close them by clicking the close icon.

6. We are now ready to make a full backup of the site (files & database). Make sure you are on the Backup/Restore tab and click the big blue Backup Now button.

7. Make sure both the ‘Include your database in the backup’ and ‘Include your files in the backup’ boxes are ticked, and click Backup Now. Depending on the size of your site (posts, images, attachments), this may take a while.

8. When it is finished, you will see the new backup under the Existing backups heading. You can download the backup data separately by clicking the relevant buttons Database, Plugins, Themes, Uploads, Others. Make sure you download all of these files for a complete backup.

How to restore your backup
When you restore a backup with Updraft, it is best to do so on a new, clean WordPress installation, because everything will be overwritten (posts, pages, plugins, uploads and users).

1. Log in to the site where you want to restore the backup file.

2. Search for ‘UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin’ and click Install Now. As soon as it turns blue, click Activate.

3. After installation, click Settings in the left-hand menu and then UpdraftPlus Backups.

4. Under the Existing backups heading, you will see a few options: Upload backup files, Rescan local folder for new backup sets, and Rescan remote storage. In this guide, we use the Upload backup files function.

5. Click Upload backup files, select the backup files on your computer and upload them. If uploading via the WordPress interface doesn’t work, you can place these files via FTP in the /wp-content/updraft/ folder. Then click Rescan local folder for new backup sets.

6. After uploading, click the Restore button under Actions.

7. The restore process starts and, if all goes well, your site is restored exactly as it was backed up.

8. You now need to log in with the username and password of the originally backed-up website.

That’s it – your WordPress site should now be fully restored from your backup!