For backup purposes of WordPress, I use a free plug in called BackWPup. It worked really well and can backup your WordPress blog to FTP server, Dropbox, Amazon S3 (nice !), SugarSync, Google Storage, Microsoft Azure and even Rackspace Cloud.
I highly recommend this plug in and also recommend you read this AMAZING SET UP article which is so detailed that you cannot go wrong.. Well…. except if you are using Namecheap server. I did not have this problem when I was using Hostgator so I placed the blame on Namecheap (kidding..)
Basically when I read BackWPup on a WordPress site that is hosted by Namecheap, I got this error message:
shell_exec() has been disabled for security reasons
Never mind. Turned to the best search engine in the world and I saw this forum posting which gave me my solution.
However, his recommended solution was “suPHP_ConfigPath /home/[accountname]/[folder]” which did not worked for me. What worked for me was to
(1) Find out the exact place where my error occured. In this case, the logs do not tell me much but when I tried to set up a new job for the backup and then attempt to link the Amazon S3 storage between WordPress and Amazon S3, it told me that there is an error in accessing this folder: /home/[accountname]/public_html/wp-content/plugins/backwpup/libs/aws/sdk.class.php
(2) So I went to my .htaccess file in my WordPress directory using Coda software and added these lines: (replace [accountname] with your accountname. I am NOT sharing mine :). MAKE A BACKUP OF THE .htaccess file. This is not an advice. This is a REQUIREMENT 🙂
suPHP_ConfigPath /home/[accountname]/public_html/wp-content/plugins/backwpup/libs/aws/sdk.class.php
(3) Save and then it worked. Again, there might be a more elegant solution and a much better one (I am sure) but this works for me 🙂 🙂
Ta ta !