Question from James A.: I read your post about why you use VaultPress to back up your blogs and I’d like to give it a try.
I usually publish from 3 to 5 new posts every day, and my posts tend to be pretty in-depth. That means recreating them if they were to get lost would be both difficult and time-consuming.
As I understand it if I choose the cheapest plan then my blog would only be backed up once each day. What concerns me is losing any posts that were published since the last backup was created.
My question is which of their three subscription options should I choose? I don’t want to over-pay but I definitely want to protect my hard work.
Rick’s answer: I certainly understand your concern, James. I usually write multiple blog posts every day as well, and I’d hate to lose any of them due to them not being backed up.
That being said. I personally subscribe to the $39 per year “Personal” plan. I recommend that you do the same, for the following reasons:
1 – While the $39 plan will only back up your blog once a day, you’d have to pay $99 per year for the only plan that makes real-time backups.
I agree that real time backups are amazing, but in my opinion they aren’t amazing enough to justify paying almost three times as much as what you’d pay for the cheapest plan.
2 – I keep local backups of all my blog posts on an external hard drive just in case things go south with one of my blogs.
All I do is copy the text for each post from the WordPress post edit form and paste it into NotePad++. I then save it onto the external drive using the current date and title as the filename.
This system will make it easy to re-create a few lost posts if I ever end up having to restore my blog from a VaultPress backup.
Bottom line: I use VaultPress to protect my blog from being a total loss if my blog ever goes belly-up on me.
However, I don’t really need for it to back up the last few posts I’ve published, just all the posts that were published before the unfortunate event took place. I can quickly recreate the remaining few from my local backups.
To me, it’s worth the hassle of keeping local backups of my posts in order to save a bundle in VaultPress fees.
I hope this helps, James. Good luck!
Update from James: That makes perfect sense Rick. Thanks for taking the time to explain your backup procedure. I think I’m going to do the same thing and go with the $39 personal plan.
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