Take a manual backup, download it or delete it

Besides scheduled backups, you can back up a site whenever you want — for example right before a big change, a theme switch or a manual edit to the site's code. Manual backups are kept until you delete them yourself.

Start a backup

1. Open Sites and click the site you want to back up.
2. Go to the Backups tab.
3. Click Start full backup for a complete copy, or Start incremental for a quicker copy of only what changed.
4. Confirm with Add to queue. You see "Added queue successfully".

The backup is added to the queue and is picked up automatically within a few minutes. While it waits or runs, you can follow it under Tasks → Backup tasks. When it is finished and stored, it appears in the site's Backups tab, and in Logs → Backups.

Full or incremental?

• Choose Start full backup when the site has no full backup yet, before a risky change you may want to undo, and whenever you want a restore point that does not depend on anything else.
• Choose Start incremental when the site already has a recent full backup and you only want a quick extra restore point. An incremental backup can only be restored together with the full backup it builds on — see How WP Safer backups work.

How long a backup takes depends mostly on the size of the site and the speed of its host: a small site usually finishes in a few minutes, a site with several gigabytes of uploads can take much longer.

When a backup cannot be started

• "It's already in queue. Please wait until finished" — a backup for this site is already waiting or running. Wait for it to finish; there is no need to start another one.
• "A restore is running for this site. Backups will resume once it finishes." — while a restore runs, Start full backup, Start incremental, Restore and the delete buttons on the Backups tab are disabled. They are enabled again when the restore is over.
• If the backup itself fails (for example the site did not respond), WP Safer tries again automatically, up to three attempts. If the last attempt also fails, the account owner receives a "Backup failed" e-mail and the failure is listed in Logs → Backups.

Download a backup

Click Download next to a backup in the Backups tab. You get the archive as a ZIP file, containing the site files and a db.sql database export. The download link is personal and expires after 10 minutes; reload the page if it has expired.

Keep in mind that an incremental archive only contains the files that changed, so on its own it is not a complete copy of the site. To put a backup back on the site, use Restore — see Restore a site from a backup.

Delete a backup

1. On the Backups tab, click the bin icon next to the backup.
2. Confirm. You see "Backup successfully deleted".

A deleted backup is not erased right away: it is moved to the trash and still counts toward your storage. On the Sites page, the Storage used card shows the space taken by the trash with a Manage link. There you can put a deleted backup back with Restore, or free the space with Delete permanently or Delete all.

Before you delete a full backup, check whether newer incremental backups depend on it: once it is gone, those incremental backups can no longer be restored. Backups created by a schedule are removed automatically by the schedule's Full backups to retain setting, so you usually do not need to delete them by hand.