Verify backups before doing updates?

Doing mass updates is nice and all, but I want to confirm all the daily backups have been successful beforehand.

Of course if a site crashes during the update, I could restore a backup, but not if the backups stopped working one fine day and I didn’t check to make sure I had a current one before updating!

Before MainWP, I would check each site manually, open UpdraftPlus and check the status of backups, I would also open my Amazon S3 and make sure the backups were sent to remote backup too. Only then would I do updates.
I still do this. I check each site for backup status, then I go back to MainWP to bulk update them after. This feels like a waste. After all if I’m already logged in to the site and poking around the dashboard, I can just as easily open the updates page and click a button to update while I’m in there. Why even use MainWP?

What I’m looking for is a way to verify that WPVivid has successfully done all its daily backups up to the retention period and that the backups are pushed to S3. If possible, show me any backup failures, and access to the log entries.

I know there is a feature to do a backup before updates, but I don’t care for this because some sites can take an hour or more to back up and I need to work through updates quicker. I may enable it anyway and change when I do updates. Regardless, I still need confirmation that the backup happened and that it was pushed to S3 successfully.

I have both UpdraftPlus and WPVivid. My Updraft accout is maxed and I bought WPVivid to test it out. I wonder if either plugin lends itself to this kind of (within MainWP) verification?

In MainWP I can open a site one by one, click on the Updraft tab, then click on the “Existing Backups” tab and wait for it to scan and update the numbers, this way I don’t have to go log in to the site and check status manually, but it’s a lot of steps just the same.
All I would really need is for the main Sites dashboard to have a column that shows me how many backups it has and when the last one was or show a red dot if there were backup errors recorded. At the least I want to verify a same-day or “last night” backup.

If nothing else, a custom plugin to sync data from WP over to MainWP, and sync S3 data over and compare everything. I know this sounds pretty complex, maybe it can’t be done?

Bottom line is, I need verification that my sites have recent backups before I do mass updates. That doesn’t sound like something out of the ordinary does it? I would think most people are hesitant to mass-update sites if they don’t even know they have a backup first!

Any options to solve this dilemma? What do you all do to verify before mass updates?

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I started using MainWP just a few months ago and I’ve had the same concerns. I also use Updraft Plus for backup. In the past Updraft would automatically backup before updating. Some of my backups take a bit longer as well.

I see the options in MainWP for these:

  • Require a backup before an update
  • Days without of a full backup tolerance

That first option sounds misleading. If you read the description on it you get a better idea of what that does. Not sure if this is really enough or not. I would also like something like what you’re explaining.

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