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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

I laughed at this "Think about what you did" - I've been a bad WordPress dev :(

No mention of backups, but that can at least save you from some of the freak out - assuming your site isn't changing more frequently then your backup scheme.

Daily backups are nice, but the problem might not be detected immediately - so snapshots (week, month, 6 month) are advisable.

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Re. Backups:

check out rsync's "--link-dest" option. It's amazing.

Alternatively, this is one thing that version control could help with. Set up a cron job to check for changes every day and commit if needed.

httrack is also very nice! I found it more comprehensive than wget's recursive mode, but I haven't compared it to rsync --link-dest.

Those tools do a very different type of job (archiving generated html). Rsync is just file transfer.

I always wanted some tripwire feature on wordpress hosts. You'd see quite fast who managed to poke to your install.

There are numerous logging plugins, and security plugins that can email you when anyone does anything on a WP site. However, it's usually not someone else who broke it, and normally is due to plugins/themes/core updates.

I remember trying a few, but ... I don't know, I wanted to have an independent isolated component.

It's a good point - a plugin that logs access won't work if you can't access the WP admin! If you move up outside of the WP environment you get into the hosting/server world and the solutions become vendor specific.

I would imagine there is (or should be) a third-party backup and logging solution that keeps the data offsite but works host-independent.

I see backups more suitable for a slighlty different topic. Something like "how to take care of your website" where there would be db otpmization, recurring backups, daily & monthly snapshots, etc.

I'm not so sure. When shit goes wrong, backups are not directly part of "solving the problem" but they are a part of the process, an essential one that can mitigate losses and provide developers with a clear path forward.

Good article though - and you're right backups probably deserve their own focused article.

thanks man!

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