Backups

The only backup that matters is the one you can restore. TubePress bundles Backup Pro, a plugin that takes complete, verified snapshots of your whole site and pushes them off-server on a schedule — with no shell access, no mysqldump and no system crontab required.

This page explains backup profiles, what each archive contains, where you can store them, how scheduling and retention work, how to restore, and why it all keeps working on a site of any size. Enable and configure it from /admin/plugins.

Backup Pro

Backup Pro protects everything needed to rebuild your site from scratch: the database plus your uploaded files, themes, plugins and configuration. It runs entirely in pure PHP through the built-in scheduler, so it works on shared hosting where you have no command line at all. The full backup history is logged in the database with the date, profile, size, duration and status, and you can download or delete any archive from the admin.

Backup profiles

Rather than one rigid job, Backup Pro lets you create multiple profiles, each with its own schedule, format, storage destination, retention policy and notifications. That lets you mix strategies, for example:

• A full daily backup pushed to S3.
• A database-only snapshot every six hours to your local server.
• A weekly archive sent to your Nextcloud over WebDAV.

Each profile runs independently, so frequent lightweight snapshots and occasional full archives can coexist.

What's included

A full backup captures all five parts of your installation:

Database Uploads Themes Plugins Config

You choose the archive format per profile — ZIP or TAR.GZ — and a profile can be scoped to just the database when you only need a fast data snapshot.

Storage destinations

Backups can be written to four kinds of destination, so you can keep them well away from the server they protect:

Scheduling & retention

Each profile runs on its own schedule — every 6 hours, 12 hours, daily, weekly or monthly — driven by the built-in scheduler, so you never touch a crontab. A retention policy per profile prunes old archives automatically, keeping the number you choose and deleting the rest, so storage never grows without bound.

Restoring

When you need to roll back, restore directly from the admin panel and choose exactly what to bring back:

Every archive is verified against its SHA-256 checksum before a restore begins, so a truncated or corrupted file is caught rather than written over your live site.

Email notifications

Each profile can email you when a backup completes or fails, to a recipient address you set per profile. That turns backups into something you can trust without checking — you only hear from them when there is good news to confirm or a failure to fix. Make sure outbound email is configured first; see Notifications.

Built for scale

Backup Pro is engineered to handle sites with millions of files. Database dumps, file copying and archive compression are all chunked, so every step finishes within PHP's time limits and the whole thing works even behind Cloudflare — no timeouts, no memory exhaustion. Because it relies on nothing but PHP, there is no mysqldump, no shell and no crontab to provision.

Next steps