How to Take a WooCommerce Backup (Database and Files)

Imagine not being able to retrieve orders, losing customers and product information. 

A single minute of downtime on your WooCommerce site can cost you hundreds of dollars. 

These are nightmare scenarios for an e-commerce store, but completely avoidable when you regularly backup your site.  

Real-time backups protect every new customer and sale, and make sure that even when you restore your store, no precious data is lost. 
Dedicated WordPress backup plugins are the best way to safeguard your store data.

TL;DR: The only way to safeguard your WooCommerce data is with real-time backups. BlogVault backs up your store every 5 minutes, so all your data is instantly retrievable. Never lose an order, transaction, product, or customer ever again.

Understanding WooCommerce backups

WooCommerce sites are dynamic; therefore WooCommerce backups must also take place in real-time

Typical WordPress backups happen once a day. Can’t have that with WooCommerce stores. 

Consider this sequence of events: 

Backup taken at 10:00 am. Order placed at 10:03 am. Product added to shop at 12:30 pm. New user registers at 4:08 pm. Order placed at 6:13 pm. Server crashes at 7:45 pm. Restore 10:00 am backup. 

Everything after 10:00 am is lost. This is why you need real-time backups.

• Backup taken at 10:00 am. Event backed up.
• Order placed at 10:03 am. Event backed up.
• Product added to shop at 12:30 pm. Event backed up.
• New user registers at 4:08 pm. Event backed up.
• Order placed at 6:13 pm. Event backed up.
• Server crashes at 7:45 pm. 
• Restore 10:00 am backup, and all the events that happened after. 

🔥 A website backup should always be a complete one that can help you restore your WordPress website in a crisis. 

Option 1. WooCommerce backup plugin [Recommended]

Backup plugins are the best way to backup your WooCommerce site.

Automatic, real-time backups and one-click restores save a lot of time and effort. Plus, they offer peace of mind about your online store.

Setting up BlogVault on your WooCommerce store takes minutes. 

Create a BlogVault account, and add your WooCommerce site. That’s it. The store will start to sync, and your site is backed up.

🔥 For WooCommerce sites, get real-time backups. With real-time backups, your site’s data as it changes. That means, as things on your site—users, transactions, and orders—they are all backed up.

Why BlogVault backups are the best

BlogVault real-time backups are the real thing. Here’s why:

• Automated backups: Set and forget it, till you need to restore. 
• Real-time backups: Changes are saved as they happen on your site. 
• Large database-friendly: Hundreds of users, thousands of products, and (hopefully) millions in revenue. BlogVault handles both large backups and restores seamlessly.
• Encrypted storage: Encrypted cloud storage with full redundancy. Other cloud services like Drive or Dropbox quickly become expensive.
• Offsite backups: Backups only on BlogVault servers; nothing on your site’s server. Bonus, if anything goes wrong with your web host, restore your site instantly on a new server from your BlogVault dashboard. 
• External dashboard: If you lose access to wp-admin, you can log into your BlogVault dashboard to restore your site with one click. 
• Emergency Connector: Restore a fully crashed WooCommerce store in minutes. 
• Integrated staging: Before making any changes to your live store, test them on an integrated staging site.

Real-time backups are the only safeguard against losing thousands in revenue because of downtime and data loss.

Option 2: Backup WooCommerce with your web host

Often web hosts include backups in their packages or as an add-on. Many backup their servers as a safety measure, but may not share these with customers.

First, check if backups are part of your package. Read the terms or contact support.

You may be able to set up automatic backups. Some hosts let you choose what to back up, but we recommend full backups. If backups are stored on your site server, server limits might affect this. Best to confirm with your host.

We offer guides for backups with GoDaddy, Siteground, WP Engine, and Bluehost.

Why web host backups shouldn’t be your primary backups

Backups are essential, even basic ones. Web host backups are easy for beginners, but have risks.

Here’s why: 

• Many web hosts store the live site and backups on the same server. If the server fails, both are lost. This is like having all eggs in one basket, and it becomes impossible to recover a lost site. 
• Backups also use server resources. If you have 30 days of backups, it means that your server effectively has 31 copies of your website. Keeping multiple backups can limit site growth.
• Some hosts offer offsite backups, but accessing them requires contacting support, which can be slow and costly if your site is down.

If your host detects malware on your site, they might delete it all, including backups. Often this can happen without proper notification.

Option 3. Backup WooCommerce website manually

In our experience, manual backups are a last resort only. They are time-consuming, and manual restores are prone to failures, especially with large backups of WooCommerce databases. 

In fact, if anyone has to rely on manual backups, chances are that this task will slide way down on their priority list. 

Regardless, it is always useful to know how to take a manual backup. 

To get a full backup of your website, you need to backup the files and database separately. Once you have done that, keep the two files together, so that during a restore you know which file backup goes with which database backup.

Step 1: Backup WooCommerce files

There are a few ways to manually back up your files: 

1. cPanel: cPanel is the most commonly used control panel software. However, depending on your web host though, you may have another one, like Plesk or Webmin. Look for a tool like File Manager on cPanel or Plesk. From here, you can download a zipped archive of your files. 
2. FTP: There are some web hosts who do not provide a control panel, so FTP then becomes an alternative. However, using FTP is a little more time-consuming. Also, you will need to install a client like FileZilla or Cyberduck to see your site’s files and folders. Once you’ve got in, download the root folder of your site. 
3. File manager plugin: You can also use a file explorer plugin to access your files.
4. SSH: If you are comfortable with the command line, use SSH to connect to your site remotely and download its files. This will generally be a one-command operation, so it is an easy although intimidating option.

Step 2: Backup WooCommerce Database

Once again, there are a few ways to backup a WooCommerce database. 

1. phpMyAdmin: You can either access it through cPanel, or directly from the browser. To access the database, you will need login credentials. These are usually available in the website’s wp-config file or the hosting account. 
2. SSH: If you downloaded files via SSH, you can use the same interface to export the WordPress database as well. 

Note: We strongly advise against taking partial database backups for WooCommerce. WooCommerce stores connected data in multiple database tables, like post and postmeta, and therefore needs to be backed up and restored as a whole. 

Why we recommend manual backups only in unusual circumstances

Manual backups with cPanel are sometimes the only thing that work, but these are in rare and extraordinary cases. 

Plus there are so many things that usually go wrong with manual backups: 

• Restoring large WooCommerce sites often fails. cPanel struggles with database restores over 5 GB, common in WooCommerce due to data accumulation.

• Manual restores cause downtime. You must delete files before copying backups, leaving your store offline. The process is stressful, and failure means no site.

• You can’t test backups beforehand. Incomplete backups are discovered only during restore, which is problematic if you’ve already deleted your site.

These are the actual experiences of our customers before they chose to use BlogVault for their WooCommerce backups. We have also tested manual backups extensively, so have experienced many of these failures first-hand.

What to back up on your WooCommerce site

Everything. 

There are no shortcuts to good WordPress backups, and definitely none for WooCommerce sites. We’ve had a lot of queries from customers who want to backup the database of their users or products, not realising that WooCommerce stores the critical data of a website in different tables in the database. 

The fact is that partial backups, like just a database backup, are just not useful for restores. WordPress stores data in different ways, and any missing data will mess up the restore, and ultimately your website. Therefore we always advocate full backups, and partial restores only from full backups.

To understand how a WordPress backup works, it is important to understand how a site is structured. There are essentially two major components of your website: the files and the database. 

• The files comprise WordPress core, plugin and theme files and folders, config files, settings files, and uploaded files like images. 
• The database has what is known as user-generated content, which typically includes posts, pages, links, comments, users, and so on. In the case of WooCommerce specifically, the database will also have information about products, transactions, and discounts, for instance. 

These two components constitute your website, and they are equally important. There is a lot of advice floating around on the internet that recommends you only have to export the database to save on storage space, since the files rarely change. 

This is terrible advice, even if it comes from a good place. It is very difficult to restore just the database, even if all the files are in place. For example, there are version changes that alter code in small ways, which could break the site altogether after a restore.

All in all, it is better to find a scalable solution that allows you to backup your whole website in its entirety, rather than cherry-pick elements and cause yourself hardship down the line.

Why you should backup WooCommerce sites

Your online store is a digital business, and just like a brick-and-mortar store, you need to insure it. That’s why you should backup your WooCommerce site. 

Problems with your web host

Independent backups are the only backups that are genuinely reliable.

Your online store is hosted on a remote server, owned by your web hosting provider. The server is basically a computer, and is subject to all the fallibilities of any other computer, like crashes, software issues, hardware issues, and environmental circumstances. There can be electrical surges, network connection problems, and much more. 

These can all cause problems with the server, which go on to make your website inaccessible. If you have opted for web host backups, then your backups are also inaccessible, rendering them largely useless. That’s why we strongly recommend external backups on a server separate from your web host. 

Update errors

Updates are an integral part of WordPress administration, but they don’t always go smoothly. Because plugins and themes are developed by various programmers, they can conflict with each other and cause issues on the website. This is especially true of large and complex plugins like WooCommerce, Elementor, and Yoast. 

But since updates are critical, you cannot avoid them altogether. Instead, you can backup your website before any updates and roll back if anything breaks. On top of that, BlogVault performs a visual regression during any update, to highlight any differences in your website before and after the update takes effect. You can check the regression results and roll back to a previous version if required. 

Malware

The immense popularity of WordPress has made it a target for hackers and their malware. Malware is always bad, but is particularly egregious for online stores. Firstly, a WooCommerce store has a ton of user information and can be a gold mine for hackers. Secondly, malware can destroy an online store by diverting traffic, and scaring away customers with spam popups and pages. Other malware can wipe out a website altogether. 

Malware can cause an online store to lose significant amounts of revenue, in the long and short term. A security plugin like MalCare, which has a scanner, cleaner, and an integrated firewall, goes a long way in protecting your WooCommerce store. However, bulletproof backups should be part of your security toolkit. 

In the event a hacker damages your website beyond the point it can be cleaned, backups are the only way you can retrieve your website at all. 

Human mistakes

All of us make mistakes from time to time. On your WooCommerce store, this could mean an incorrect setting or a small design change can crash the website. The mistake is not deliberate or malicious like malware, but it still needs to be fixed. 

That’s where backups come in. As soon as a website crashes, you can restore it instantly with a BlogVault backup. Your online store is as good as new.

In our experience, it is always better to backup your website just before any major changes are made to it. Frankly, taking backups even before any minor changes also saves a lot of time debugging and troubleshooting. However, this is not practical with manual or web host backups. With BlogVault though, you can backup your website with a click of a button just before you do something. Even if you don’t, you can rest assured that you have a day-old backup in case something breaks.

When to backup WooCommerce sites

Every time something changes on your site 

WooCommerce sites are dynamic, which means things are happening on them throughout the day. There are transactions, orders and customer data added, removed or changed, and all that information needs to be captured. 

The question to ask here is: how much of this information are you willing to lose? If the answer is none of it, then you need real-time backups. 

On-demand backups

Consider taking an on-demand backup before major changes like updates, migrations, or UI fixes. This ensures you can revert the change, if needed.

Good vs bad WooCommerce backups

Backups seem mundane till they are needed. There are so many things that can go wrong with sites: botched plugin updates, crashes, lost content, and more. So it is critical to choose backups that can weather all these issues.  

When looking for good backups for your WooCommerce site, these are the factors to consider: 

• Reliable backups and error-free restores
• Real-time backups
• Restores even when the site is down
• Automatic and scheduled backups
• Sufficient backup history; minimum of 90 days
• Incremental backups that save changes made to your site, not the whole site each time
• Encrypted backups
• Unlimited backup storage
• Full backups of the website
• Backups stored independent of your website’s server

BlogVault ticks all these criteria, and does more. It is the perfect solution for backing up your WooCommerce site, so you can have peace of mind. 

Conclusion

With a WooCommerce store, every minute your site is down is a loss in revenue. You need great backups that not only save your website, but also work out of the box. Backups are the last thing you should worry about, because they should work automatically and without your intervention. 

BlogVault backups, with real-time event capture, and seamless restores are the only real choice for your WooCommerce site. With BlogVault, you are subscribing to peace of mind that your e-commerce store is in good hands.

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