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Scheduling multiple site backups

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Watchful lets you schedule up to three independent backups for each site in your dashboard. Each backup can use a different schedule, backup plugin, or backup configuration.

Multiple backup schedules are useful for websites with frequently changing content, such as online stores, membership websites, and active blogs.

For example, you might configure:

  • Daily backups of your website database.
  • Weekly backups of your website files.
  • Monthly backups of your entire website, including files and database.

By scheduling different backups independently, you can protect frequently changing content without performing a full-site backup every day.

Multiple backup schedules are available with Watchful Premium.

Before you begin

Before scheduling multiple backups, make sure that:

  • Your website is connected to Watchful.
  • You have installed and configured at least one supported backup plugin.
  • Any backup profiles or file exclusions you intend to use have been configured and tested in the backup plugin.

Watchful supports the following backup plugins:

You can use the same backup plugin for multiple backup configurations or combine different supported plugins on one website.

How to schedule multiple backups

Follow these steps to add another scheduled backup to a website.

  1. Log in to Watchful and navigate to the Sites Dashboard.
  2. Find the website you want to configure and click its name to open the site drawer.
  3. Click Edit to open the Edit Site modal.
  4. Locate the backup settings and click Add Profile to create another backup configuration.
  5. Select the backup plugin you want to use.
  6. Configure the available backup options for your selected plugin. These may include a backup profile, remote storage destination, or other plugin-specific settings.
  7. Set the backup schedule to daily, weekly, or monthly. For weekly backups, select the appropriate days.
  8. Choose the time of day when the backup should run. We recommend scheduling backups during periods of low website traffic.
  9. Configure the Stale backup warning threshold.
  10. Click Save to save your changes.

Repeat these steps to configure additional backups, up to a maximum of three per site.

Separate scheduled backups by at least one hour

Creating backups can consume significant server resources, particularly when backing up large websites.

We recommend scheduling backups at least one hour apart to reduce the possibility of overlapping backup processes.

For example:

  • Daily database backup — 2:00 AM
  • Weekly full-site backup — Sunday at 3:00 AM
  • Monthly full-site backup — First scheduled day of the month at 4:00 AM

On days when multiple backups are scheduled, the different start times help distribute the workload on your server.

For very large websites, consider allowing more time between backups.

Test your backup configurations

After configuring your schedules, we recommend testing each backup to confirm that it works as expected.

  1. Return to the Sites Dashboard.
  2. Click the website name to open the site drawer.
  3. Click Start Backup to open the backup modal.
  4. If you have configured multiple backups, select the configuration you want to test from the dropdown.
  5. Click Start Backup to begin the process.
  6. Monitor the backup progress and confirm that it completes successfully.

Repeat the process for each configured backup.

When using remote storage, also verify that the backup files are available at the expected destination.

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