Backups on Flywheel

Updated on March 26th, 2021

Flywheel backs up your site each and every night, making sure that your important data is safe and secure. This way, you can revert to a previous version in the event that you made a change that broke the site, or for any other reason.

Backups are visible on the Backups tab on a site page in the Flywheel control panel. From here you can see statistics about each backup, and select an individual backup to restore:

How often are files backed up and how long are they stored?

We back up sites nightly. Backups are stored for 30 days, after which they are deleted permanently. If you’d like to have access to a backup for longer than 30 days after its creation, we recommend you download a copy.

What data is backed up?

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

Note

Because we back up your files for you, we discourage the use of backup plugins, as they often take up system resources, disk space, and may cause unforeseen conflicts with our existing backup processes.

If you do prefer to run your own backups using a plugin, we strongly recommend storing those backups offsite, to avoid taking up site disk space unnecessarily.

It’s for these reasons too, that during our backup process we exclude backup files, security scan files and cache stores that were created from plugins.

For more information, see the help article: What plugins are not recommended?

Can I download a .zip file of my backup?

Yes! Just hover over the ellipsis icon on the right side of the backup you’d like to download. In the dropdown menu that appears, you’ll see the option to create a download of that backup.

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