Sneaky Tricksters

https://xpil.eu/ydfw 📋

This blog sits on the WordPress platform, self-hosted by me on a VPS server, which I've written about a few times before. Since Murphy's law is always at work, it's important to protect against the worst. So, three years ago, I decided to purchase a native backup from the manufacturer, charmingly named Vaultpress.

At that time, the pleasure cost me $45 per year, which was about €39 back then, amounting to roughly €3 per month. Not too bad. In exchange for this modest fee, Vaultpress guaranteed daily backups from day #1 to the end of time.

Along the way, I experienced one or two outages (mainly caused by unnecessarily meddling in the workings of the WordPress machinery), from which I was able to recover thanks to these Vaultpress backups. I also found that their automatic backup restoration process didn't always work as it should - but at least I could always download a fresh copy of the database and file system from their repository, and that was all I needed, so no big deal.

Since business is business and nothing lasts forever, it turns out that the price of the annual subscription fluctuates a bit:

... which in our currency starts to approach €50 per year, or about €4 per month. Still not a colossal amount of money, but...

Every once in a while, I check their administrative interface for peace of mind that the backup is actually working. And what did I find? Some time ago, Vaultpress abandoned the idea of storing backups forever and now limits them to the last 35 days.

It's all fine, but why wasn't I informed about this change? What if, in a fit of nostalgic melancholy (or was it melancholic nostalgy?), I want to see what my blog looked like 3 years ago?

And now, since there's "only" a 35-day buffer, shouldn't they also lower the price a bit? But it doesn't seem like that's going to happen.

Of course, there's another side to this. If you look at the Vaultpress website, you'll see that the cheapest option indeed costs about €4.50 per month and only offers 10GB of space for backups, while my blog currently hovers around 7GB, which multiplied by 35 days is about a quarter of a terabyte, quite a lot. But they should have informed me about this reduction in service, regardless.

Therefore, I'm considering dropping Vaultpress and implementing my own backup system. After all, I have a home NAS with feckintillions of disk space and a half-empty 2TB Dropbox account that could be put to good use...

Not any day soon - but it's worth considering.

So, dear Reader, if you have your blog on WordPress and make backups automatically, I'd be eager to hear some ideas. Ideally, it should be simple, cheap, and reliable (and no, not just two out of three...).

https://xpil.eu/ydfw 📋