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Restore individual subsites from backup?

Is it possible to restore individual subsites of a multisite from the backups on WPMUDEV Hosting? I understand that the actual backup would probably be of the entire network, but I only want to restore one of the subsites. Is that possible?

Fri, 8 Mar 2019 7:32:46
  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Greg

    I hope you’re well today and thank you for your question!

    The way this backup is created is quite different than any backup that would be created by some plugin. It’s incremental (so not all “backup points” include all the data of the installation) and it’s on a filesystem level – so we can’t for example extract single files or database tables from it, like we could from e.g. zip file created by some backup plugin.

    In this case that’s either restoring entire backup – which will affect entire install (entire server of yours actually) – or nothing.

    I have, however, asked our hosting admins if there are “options” to somehow achieve that so I’ll update you here when I get to know more from them.

    Kind regards,

    Adam

  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Greg

    A small update from my end. Actually, it seems I wasn’t quite right. I mean: what I wrote about backup is correct but when you download the backup (which you can do from your WPMU DEV Hosting panel) you’ll get a file that could be used to extract “single site data”. However, and this is when things get complicated again, it’s not that simple and extracting all the necessary data, then “putting it back to the site” would mean quite a lot of things to be done manually. So, it’s more of a “theoretical option”. But I’ll do some testing on this meanwhile to see what options there could be and I’ll update you here soon.

    As for ManagedWP and their incremental backups. That’s a different thing and a different kind (“tech-wise”:wink: of backup. It’s more similar to Snapshot than to the server backup. In Snapshot you got two tools: Snapshots – where you actually do backups of selected sites individually (one site per backup) and Managed Backups – which is always full backup. In fact the first one can be used to to what you say “out of the box” and the second one could be used like that too, though with a bit more effort because site would have to be restored manually (by copying files and importing db tables with phpMyAdmin). The only difference is that Snapshot doesn’t do incremental backups. Yet :slight_smile: We’re looking into it as something that might possibly be added in future.

    Best regards,

    Adam

  • Greg
    • The Crimson Coder

    Ah, good to know, thanks. I feel like there must be some kind of creative solution that would make it possible, but if anyone can figure it out it’s you guys. :wink: In any case, I ended up just restoring the network – fortunately the most recent backup fixed the issue. I’ll probably use ManageWP or figure out some solution with Snapshot too though – my worry is that one day something might go wrong on one of the subsites that I don’t notice for like a week, and then I’d end up not being able to restore it because it would un-do all the recent changes on the other subsites.