Your website is an essential component of your small business marketing system. It is the foundation of your Total Online Presence and chances are you have invested significant time and resources creating and maintaining it. Are you protecting that investment with regular backups? More importantly, if you had to, could you restore your website quickly using those backups?

If the answer is “no” or “I’m not sure”, take a look at BackupBuddy from iThemes. . I’ve been using BackupBuddy for several years and it is easily the most important tool in my website development toolbox.

BackupBuddy 3.3 was recently released and contains a number of improvements to help insure you not only get a solid backup every time, but that you can can back up and running quickly if you ever need to restore your site.

One of the new features of the latest version is ability to cancel a backup. BackupBuddy gives you the ability to control many aspects of your backup – if you forgot to change a setting (i.e. exclude a directory) you can cancel the backup, change your settings, and restart your backup.

One of the great things about WordPress is the plethora of plugins that are available to add functionality to your site. Unfortunately, the code in those plugins will sometimes cause conflicts with other plugins. Depending on the number of plugins your site uses, tracking down these conflicts can be tedious. BackupBuddy’s Server Information page now lists your site’s active WordPress plugins and helps point out any known problems with these plugins.

BackupBuddy allows you to create scheduled backups. It used to be a common practice to create a manual backup first, to test all of the configuration settings (i.e. offsite storage). Once you were confident, you would then duplicate those settings in a scheduled backup. BackupBuddy now allows you to manually run a scheduled backup. This allows you to create your scheduled backup up and then test them by hovering a schedule on the Scheduling page and selecting “Run Now”.

Have you ever looked at a list of backup files and wondered what information each file contained? Each backup could contain a different version of WordPress, could have been created with a different version of BackupBuddy, or could be a different type of backup (full vs. database). You can now select “View Details” on the backup page to quickly access the information about each of your backup files.

There is nothing more frustrating than trying to restore a backup that is incomplete or corrupted. The new version of BackupBuddy performs a file integrity scan to further insure that you have a good backup should you ever need it.

If you have never had to perform a site restore from a backup file before, the process can be a little intimidating. ImportBuddy (the “restore” half of BackupBuddy) includes a quick-reference to help you solve potential problems (due to server issues or settings/configuration) and some simple solutions.

ImportBuddy also includes error-catching and problem logging to help you or your website support team quickly identify and resolve any issues with restoring your site.

Those are just the highlights of the updates contained in BackupBuddy 3.3. I can’t recommend BackupBuddy highly enough, it has saved me countless hours as a developer moving sites from one host to another. I’ve also used it to help several clients whose sites had been hacked get back up and running in under an hour.

P.S. If you are enrolled in one of our managed website programs, your site is already being protected by BackupBuddy.