How do I create a backup?

Updated on May 1st, 2020

Flywheel makes a full backup of each site every night and stores those backups for 30 days (or the 30 most recent backups if any manual backups are created). You can also create a backup any time from your site’s Backups tab – 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 just 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.

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

Note

In some cases, you may see question marks in the place of your site statistics. This typically means Flywheel had trouble retrieving the data from your site, but it doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with your site or data. If there is a row listed in your Backups table, your backup completed successfully.