Backups on Flywheel

Flywheel takes a backup of your site every night to make sure that important data is saved. This allows you to revert to a previous version in the event that you made a change that broke the site, or for any other reason.

Where to find a backup

Backups can be found under the Backups tab on the site’s page with the Flywheel app. From here you can see statistics about each backup and select an individual backup to restore.

Backups are stored for 30 days and deleted permanently after that. If you’d like to have access to a backup for longer than 30 days after its creation, we recommend you download a copy.

Backups are stored offsite on a different set of servers than your live site.

What data is backed up?

We back up everything in your WordPress® folder, including all uploaded files (/wp-content/uploads).¹ We also back up the site’s database.

Even though Flywheel takes a backup every night, we still recommend you create your own backups and store them offsite. This will avoid taking up site disk space unnecessarily.

Create a backup

You can create a backup at any time from your site’s Backups tab. This is useful if you’re going to install a new plugin or theme or make significant changes to your site. That way if anything goes wrong, you can restore the backup you just made.

To create a backup on Flywheel, simply navigate to the Backups tab for the site you’re working on and click the Create new backup button.

You’ll be prompted to add a description to the backup. These descriptions can help you remember why you created a particular backup, and they also help you differentiate your backups in the event you need to restore them.

After you’ve added your description, click Create Backup. A progress bar will appear, showing you the status of your backup.

Restore a backup

To restore a backup, simply navigate to the Backups tab for a site, and click Restore on the backup that you’d like to revert back to.

Clicking the “Restore” button will open a confirmation screen asking you to confirm that you’d like to overwrite all of the files of your site. You will need to check the box and type your Flywheel password to confirm that you’d like to restore this backup.

When you’re ready to restore the backup, click the “Restore backup” button and the restoration process will begin.

Note: The amount of time it takes to complete the restoration process depends on the size of your site. Larger sites that contain a large number of media, files, plugins, etc. or bigger databases can take more time.

Download a backup

Navigate to the Backups tab to see a list of available backups for your site.

Hover over or touch the ellipsis icon to the right of the backup you’d like to download. You’ll see a dropdown menu with the option to download.

You should get a message immediately letting you know that we’ve got your backup on the way.

When your backup is ready, you’ll get an email with a download link. A small site backup should usually arrive within a couple of minutes or so, but larger sites may take a while. We suggest waiting for about 10-15 minutes per gigabyte (you can view site size information on the stats tab).

Need help?

If you have any questions our Happiness Engineers are here to help!