This is possibly the most important video in the series! Making regular, automatic backups is the only way that you can be sure to have a recent backup when something happens to your site. This video shows how to set those up.

Schedules

The most important part of backing up your site is doing it regularly! Now, if you're like me, you don't think about backing up your site until something has already happened, and you need to restore from a backup. But, at that point, it's too late. So, setting up a backup schedule can save you big time if (or rather when) something happens.

Let's setup a daily backup using the "Default Settings" profile.

  • Go to the "Schedules" tab
  • Click "Add Schedule"
  • [x] Enabled
  • Schedule Name: Daily Backups
  • Settings Profile: Default Settings (You'll notice our other two profiles in the drop down)
  • Backup every: 1 Days
  • Number of Backup files to keep: 14 (If you're backing up to your server, it's a good idea to delete old backups to free up disk space. Again, if you're like me, you won't remember to do this regularly, so it's a good idea to have Backup and Migrate do it automatically. Setting this to 14, will keep our daily backups for two weeks, and then delete the oldest backup when a new one is created.)
  • Destination: Scheduled Backups Directory (Right now, this is our only option. In future videos we're going to explore additional destinations like email, Amazon S3, and my personal favorite NodeSquirrell.
  • (Save schedule)

Now we see the "Daily Backup" schedule listed on the "Schedules" page. I'm going to create one more schedule, and have it backup using the "Locked Tables & Offline" profile once a week.

  • Click "Add Schedule"
  • [x] Enabled
  • Schedule Name: Weekly Locked and Offline Backup
  • Settings Profile: Locked Tables & Offline
  • Backup every: 1 Weeks
  • Number of Backup files to keep: 8 (This will keep roughly two months of weekly backups.)
  • Destination: Scheduled Backups Directory
  • (Save schedule)

Now that we've got our schedules setup, they will be fired when cron runs. If you'd like to have these go ahead and run now, you can simply run cron manually.

Now, when we go back to "Configuration => System => Backup and Migrate => Schedules" (admin/config/system/backup_migrate/schedule) we see the date and time each schedule was last run.