How to enable automatic backup for WordPress multisite and single-site?

Background

If you are using Prime Mover PRO 2.0.0+, you can use the automatic backup feature to automatically create backup snapshots of your site. You don’t need to log in to your site to make backups manually.

The automatic backup feature will work if your site and hosting fully support WordPress CRON jobs and are working properly.

This is a PRO feature and requires a license to work. If you haven’t got one, it’s time to upgrade to a PRO plan.

Enabling Automatic Backup

To enable automatic backup is easy:

• Login to your site as administrator or super administrator (if multisite).
• If you use a single site, ensure the site has a PRO license activated.
• If you use multisite, ensure all subsites you want automatic backup are activated with a PRO license.
• Go to Prime Mover PRO -> Settings -> Backup Management -> Automatic Backup.

• Please check the “Automatic Backup” checkbox and save. This activates the automatic backup globally, but it won’t run yet because you still need to configure the sites’ auto backup settings.

• After saving it, click the “Scheduled backup” link or go to Prime Mover PRO -> Toolbox.
• [OPTIONAL] In multisite – to load the correct automatic backup settings, you should enter the blog ID of that subsite.

• In the Toolbox – please configure each of the minimum required settings for auto backup to work, namely:
  • Backup options – e.g., full backup, database + media only, or database-only backup.
  • Backup schedule – defaults show the most common schedules, but you can also set custom schedules if necessary.
  • Automatic backup (checkbox on multisite only): The network administrator can turn on and off the auto backup on a per-subsite basis.

• Once all required settings are saved, verify that the backup is queued for running by going to Prime Mover PRO -> Event Viewer. If the backup task appears here, you have configured it correctly.

• Check that two backup CRON tasks appear for every configured site in the Event Viewer. The first task is the main auto-backup event that depends on your backup schedule. The second task is the progress event, which is meant to check/continue pending automatic backup processes. This depends on your backup retry timeout options for that site – currently, this defaults to 50 seconds. This means that automatic backup processes can run up to 50 seconds on each session before it exits and tries again. This control ensures that all PHP processes are within your server timeout (most hosting is set to 60 seconds or even more). If your host kills PHP processes running for more than 30 seconds (this is rare, though), Then you need to lower the retry timeout settings to 20 seconds. This will ensure that your host does not kill backup processes on each session but will continue to run until completion.

• [OPTIONAL] Set the Retry Timeout Options as high as possible but within your hosting timeout for best performance. This depends on your hosting server timeout (please check with your hosting tech support). By default, this is set to 50 seconds, which is best for shared hosting with a timeout of 120 seconds (standard among popular hosts like Hostinger). Don’t exceed your retry timeout setting with your hosting timeout; otherwise, your auto-backup process can hang without noticeable errors in the logs. Hosts will kill these running processes silently if you are unsure about your host timeout setting – set this to default (50 seconds) or even 20 seconds to be sure.

• [OPTIONAL] For best performance, go to Prime Mover PRO -> Advanced -> Debugging Tools -> Turbo mode. Check “Enable turbo mode.” This significantly speeds up automatic backup creation. However, please check if this is supported by hosts as well. Please refer to this dedicated guide regarding this setting.

• [OPTIONAL] Backup redundancy is usually the best practice. You can optionally configure to upload your backups to cloud services such as Google Drive and Dropbox. Check the backup to Google Drive or Dropbox once these cloud services are configured to work with the Prime Mover plugin. Once checked – automatic backup creates a clone copy of the finished backup and saves it to the cloud. The original backup copy is still saved within your server. These redundant copies are helpful if you need them.

• That’s it. Done. If you are using multisite – you will need to enable and configure each subsite for automatic backups to work (via Prime Mover PRO -> Toolbox and enter the blog ID to load the specific subsite settings). You can monitor everything on the Event Viewer (including its progress or queued backups for all sites where you have enabled auto-backups).

Ensuring your auto-backup schedule will run

WordPress cron fires whenever a page is visited on your site. If you have a low-traffic site, your automatic backup tasks won’t fire as often as those of a high-traffic site.

You can use a free external cron service to ensure your schedules will run (regardless of your site traffic). If you are configuring automatic backup with multisite, set the cron URL correctly via the external cron service.

You can also enable it using your hosting cron feature, which is easy and convenient.

Important Notes

• If you disable or deactivate the Prime Mover PRO license for a site with automatic backup enabled, the backup can no longer run. A valid license must always be active for automatic backup to continue.

• If your PRO license expires, the automatic backup configured for that site will no longer run. So make sure to renew before your license expires, or, even better, ensure automatic renewal is enabled inside your Freemius account.

• Prime Mover PRO does not delete old backups automatically. So, you must look at your site occasionally and decide what backups to delete manually (to manage your hosting disk space allocation). The site owner/administrator should resolve this matter. It is because what backups to retain or delete does not depend on the age of the backup but on its usefulness and relevance to your site functionality.

Need technical assistance?

If you have issues with automatic / scheduled backups, please contact our technical support team.

Last updated: January 11, 2025