BackupBuddy: How to Restore Your WordPress Database

It goes without saying that every single website needs a backup. And many freelancers and web designers are even using backups as an additional revenue stream for their businesses. iThemes revolutionized the industry when we created BackupBuddy and we have made restoring backups to a WordPress site even simpler.

BackupBuddy has the capability of restoring WordPress sites directly within WordPress. This also applies to restoring your database as well, so in this post, we will cover how to restore your database backup. First, the only thing you will need is a full backup or a database only backup. BackupBuddy will be able to restore SQL tables from either type of backup.

Let’s Begin Restoring Your Site

The first step to restoring your WordPress database, you will want to head over to the Backups page and click the Restore Backup tab.

Next, pick the backup you wish to restore the database with. In this case, we will restore the database from a full backup. Click the Restore button adjacent to the Restore Files button, and you can choose what you wish to restore from this full backup.

On this step, make sure to click the “Database Only” option. Then verify you wish to restore the database by checking the verification box. BackupBuddy will now begin restoring your WordPress database. You can navigate away from this tab and work on other projects, or you could always stay on the page and view the restoration process.

At this point, BackupBuddy will begin creating temporary tables in the database and then will proceed to dump rows into these temporary tables. When this is complete, it will replace these tables with the tables that correspond to your table’s prefixes.

Note: this process may take some time depending on how many tables

Your WordPress Database Restored

Upon restoring your WordPress site, you may encounter that you need to sign back into your admin account. This is normal, and not to be concerned about. This is due to being logged in with another session whenever the backup was made initially. It will look like it doesn’t match with the current session you are using to be logged in.

You will now see that the database has been restored by seeing this message under the Restore Backup tab. If you would like to be certain, you can confirm the change took place. Simple, login to your SQL server and see that the changes occurred.

Your WordPress site has now been restored!

Backups go hand in hand with a good security solution. Here are 5 tips to secure your WordPress site. And if you are not using iThemes Security now is a good time to start.

Ready to put your knowledge of restoring backups to use in your business? Join us for the Digital Marketing Summit on February 28th.

Learn More at the Summit!