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WordPress Backups

Panelica 1.0.375 Verified 2026-07-23 WordPress Toolkit

WordPress backups are per-installation snapshots you create, download, restore and prune from one screen, and they are deliberately paranoid: checksummed archives, a safety backup before every restore, and your live wp-config is never overwritten. Backups of deleted sites do not die with the site; they move to the archive and can be restored into a brand-new installation.

Panel locationWP Toolkit → WordPress Backupshttps://YOUR-SERVER-IP:8443/wordpress/backup
 WordPress Backups
Total Backups
14
Completed
13
Failed
1
Total Size
9.4 GB
BackupTypeContentSizeStatusActions
pre-update-woo
example.com · 23.07.2026
FullFiles DB1.9 GB
sha256: 4f8a2c1d
Completedrestore · download · delete

Creating backups

Create Backup asks for the site, the type (Full, Files only or Database only), and an optional name and note; unnamed backups get a timestamped name. The job runs in the background: pending and in-progress rows refresh themselves until they complete, and four stat cards keep the totals in view.

Behind the scenes: the database is captured with a streamed, single-transaction dump: consistent without locking the site, safe for databases of any size, with credentials never exposed on the process list. Files are archived with cache and log directories excluded. The final artifact is one tar.gz containing the SQL dump, the files archive and a metadata file, fingerprinted with a SHA-256 checksum stored alongside; a corrupted archive is refused at restore time instead of producing a half-restored site. One backup per site runs at a time, and a free-disk check runs before anything starts.

The list and the details

Filters cover site, type, status and free text; columns sort; pages size from 10 to 50 rows. Each row shows what the archive contains (Files and DB badges), its size, duration and the first characters of its checksum. The details dialog holds the full metadata: WordPress and PHP versions at backup time, notes, the complete SHA-256, and shortcuts to download or restore.

Download streams the archive as name.tar.gz through the browser without buffering it in memory, so multi-gigabyte backups download fine.

Restoring

Restore, available on completed backups, opens a dialog that shows the backup's summary and lets you choose the scope: files, database or both (only what the archive actually contains is offered). Frozen sites refuse restores until unfrozen.

Behind the scenes: two safety nets sit under every restore. First, the archive's checksum is verified; a mismatch aborts the restore. Second, an automatic pre-restore backup of the current state is taken first, so even a restore can be undone. During the file restore, wp-config.php is deliberately never overwritten: your live database credentials and any operator edits survive, which is exactly what you want when rolling a hacked site back to last week's files.

Deleting backups, singly or in bulk, is a typed-confirmation destructive action; the dialog shows the total size about to be freed before you commit.

Habit worth keeping: take a named Full backup ("pre-update-woo") before every major plugin or core update. With the one-per-site queue and streamed dumps, it costs a couple of minutes and turns any failed update into a non-event.

Archived backups

When a WordPress installation is uninstalled, its backups are not thrown away: they detach from the site and appear under WP Toolkit → Archived Backups (/wordpress/archived-backups), each showing its origin site, size, and a retention badge (kept forever, days remaining, or expired).

The special power here is Restore to New: pick any archived backup, choose a target domain (optionally a subdirectory), and the panel resurrects the site as a fresh installation. Deleting a customer's account no longer means their site is unrecoverable next week.

Access

The Backups page sits behind the wordpress license feature; both pages follow the Toolkit's RBAC scoping, so you manage backups for the sites of accounts you own. Backups live under the panel's own backup storage, outside the site's web root.

Panelica Documentation · Written and verified against the live panel. · Last verified 2026-07-23 on Panelica 1.0.375