An integrated local snapshotting / backup functionality

Firstly, I continue to be really impressed with LocalWP!

I’ve been developing Wordpress sites on a semi-hobby basis for a reasonably long amount of time (15 years … ish) and this is one of the most useful tools I’ve encountered.

I’m always particularly keen on having a robust backup functionality in place when building websites.

My typical approach (and what I use currently) is to have a daily cloud-to-cloud backup (I use Snapshooter to do an incremental to B2). However when actively trying out plugins (etc) sometimes even a daily RTO is too long and both on-demand and hourly snapshotting would be more helpful.

My ideal form of backup while developing would be something very similar to Git where I can commit to a repository at certain points (usually when everything is stable).

My ideas for bringing that functionality into the way LocalWP works would be:

  • On-demand snapshots
  • Fixed snapshots (say hourly while the project is open)

Frontend feature: a simple GUI that configures snapshotting on the directory filesystem either to a separate path or one that is ignored when pushing/pulling from the remote.

Given that snapshotting is always done incrementally I don’t imagine either would impose an undue storage burden. I could probably script this locally but an integrated feature would of course be easier to work with.

Thank you for this @danielrosehill! Great idea. We’ve definitely discussed other ways of handling backups to make things a bit smoother.