user guide

Restoring a backup

Restoring puts a site back to the state a backup captured. It is designed for the worst day: it works even when the site itself is broken, and it protects you from making things worse while you do it.

Starting a restore

On the site’s Backups page, pick a completed backup and choose Restore. Select what to restore (database, files, uploads; you can restore just one part) and confirm. A restore always goes back to the same site the backup was taken from.

The safety backup

Leave the safety backup option on (it is recommended). Before touching anything, the dashboard takes a fresh backup of the site as it is right now, and the restore waits for it to finish. If the safety backup fails, the restore does not run at all. This means a restore can never leave you with less than you started with: whatever the outcome, the pre-restore state is saved and restorable too.

What happens during a restore

The restore is engineered to keep the site’s downtime near zero:

  1. The backup archives are downloaded to the site in chunks and their integrity is verified against checksums recorded at backup time.
  2. Files are unpacked into a staging area and the database is imported into temporary tables, all while the live site keeps running.
  3. Only then does a single short switch-over go live: tables and directories are swapped atomically under maintenance mode, which takes seconds.

The connector plugin and its pairing with the dashboard are always preserved, even when the backup predates the connection, so the site never drops off your dashboard mid-restore. Afterwards the dashboard re-reads the site’s inventory so what you see matches what is now live.

Restoring a broken site

The flagship case: a plugin update fatals the whole site, wp-admin included. The connector installs a tiny rescue layer that loads before all other plugins, so the dashboard can still reach the site even when every request otherwise crashes. Restore a known-good backup from the dashboard as usual; the safety backup works in that state too. No FTP, no editing wp-config by hand.

After the restore

  • Check the site front end and wp-admin; one-click admin login still works.
  • The activity log records the restore, who started it and what it contained.
  • If you restored to undo a bad update, consider pinning that plugin to the older version (Rollback version keeps it available) until a fixed release ships.