How To Manually Restore A WordPress Backup Creator Backup

Everyone knows how important it is to keep backups of your WordPress website, but how do you restore those backups once you need them?

There are many backup/restoration plugins on the market with Backup Creator being one.

Unfortunately, they don’t have much documentation on their website, so I thought I’d type up a quick tutorial to help those that use this piece of software out!

What Does The Backup Creator Backup Contain?

Basically, Backup Creator zips up your entire WordPress directory and your database and lumps it into one nicely zipped backup file.

You can extract it on your computer and you’ll notice they include re-name some of the files:

• backupcreatorfile-config – wp-config.php
• backupcreatorfile-htaccess – .htaccess
• backupcreatorfile-oldpath – The /path/to/home of the previous install
• backupcreatorfile-sourceurl – URL to your website
• backupcreatorfile-sql – Your database backup sql file
• backupcreatorfile-tableprefix – The table prefix of your database

How To Manually Restore A WordPress Backup Creator File

1. That backup creator zip file is a valid zip file so you can unzip and manually upload the WordPress files.

2. The database is within that zip file and named backupcreatorfile-sql, so you can import that using phpMyAdmin. Create user, database, and grant user to database, then import the SQL file.

3. Also within the zip file is backupcreatorfile-config which you can rename to wp-config.php.

4. Edit the newly renamed wp-config.php to point to the database and user from step #2 above.

If the restoration URL is different than the backup, then these two final steps are required…

5. Add these two lines to wp-config.php:

define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://urltothenewsite.com‘);

define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://urltothenewsite.com‘);

That should allow you to login to the new site (as opposed to redirecting you offsite).

6. After logging in, install the Search and Replace plugin and replace all instances of the old URL within the database with the new one. You can then delete those two lines mentioned above from wp-config.php and uninstall the Search and Replace plugin.

Ryan Gray

Ryan Gray is the founder and CEO of NameHero, one of the fastest growing independent web hosts in the United States. Ryan has been working online since 1998 and has over two-decades experience in Internet Entrepreneurship.