In this video I will explain how to use CMS Commander to create backups of all your websites regularly and automatically.

Having a recent backup of all your sites is important to be able to restore them in case of an emergency.

The feature can be found on the “Backups” page in your account. To start you need to create a backup task, which tells CMS Commander what to backup, how and when. You can create any number of tasks, for example for different sites or different backup types.

To create your first task go to the “Create Backup Task” tab.
Here you first need to enter a name for your task.

And then choose when you want to create a new backup, either every day, week or month.
You can also modify the hour of the day the backup gets created on.

“Type” tells CMS Commander what to back up: Either only the Database, which includes all your posts, users and other data or the full site with physical files as well.

If you select “Full Site” as Type you can use the “Exclude Folders” setting to prevent a certain part of your site from being saved – useful for example if you have a plugin that generates a folder with a big file size.

In the same way “Include Folder” can be used to add a folder to the backup that is not part of the standard WordPress file structure.

Try activating “Disable Compression” if you have problems with backups failing since it reduces the memory usage on your server.
The Optimize database setting applies some functions to your database to free up unnecessary space and reduce its size before each backup.

Next you need to choose where you want to save your backup files to. You can choose any or all of the five destinations CMS Commander supports.

The first one saves the file to the server of the site that was backed up. It is easy to use since it does not require additional setup but you should at least use one or two other destinations for better security.

The second destination sends the files to any email address of your choice.

The third to fifth option save the backup files to a Dropbox account, Amazon S3 account and FTP account respectively. To use each of them just check the checkbox and then enter your account details into the form.

Finally you need to select all the websites you want to backup with this task. You do that by checking them in the “Your Sites” list.

Then press the “Create” button and your new task will now show up in the list on the first tab. Here you have the option to delete or edit it, run it manually to create a new backup now and display the results of the automatic backups.