I don’t know where else to turn to for help on this. I have HostGator and this cPanel for hosting my WordPress site.
When it comes to going to this part of site management, I am in WAY over my head. When having to address issues on this and getting on with HostGator customer service, I get nowhere. Perhaps it is not their place?
Please forgive my ignorance as I am learning this part of site-building.
The issue was that my site is s – l – o – w. We’ve determined that images need to be compressed and lazy load enabled along with a few other things (PHP updated but I guess 8.x is not yet supported for my Hostgator plan – I am at 7.4.x).
Anyway, while reviewing possible reasons for the speed, it was determined that my backup plug (Free version of UPDRAFT) was taking quite a bit of space of my hosting plan. Now, from my little knowledge, I have UPDRAFT set up to save two backup zip files on my Google Drive every two hours. And I can see a set of 8 to 9 .zip files – db.gz, others, plugins, themes, uploads…
I was directed to look at “cPanel > public html > wp-content > updraft” (see attached screenshot).
I work on my site daily. I edit all kids of content; there isn’t much that is dormant. Here are my questions:
1. What would cause the gap ofbackup files between December 2020 and June 2022?
2. Are the (large) backup files from Dec 2020 necessary to keep, given that new backups are there from June 2022?
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> What would cause the gap ofbackup files between December 2020 and June 2022?
Chances are the PHP version running before prevented Updrafts from running. Once you updated then the plugin started working again. That’s a guess but I’ve seen that happen.
> Are the (large) backup files from Dec 2020 necessary to keep, given that new backups are there from June 2022?
Not necessary. Delete them. There’s a setting in Updrafts that you can tell it to delete the extras once a new one is made.
What exactly do you need help with? The performance issue or the gap in your backups?
I don’t think anyone would know why you have a gap in your backups. That’s something only you would know. In regards to whether or not you should keep the older backups, probably not. I mean what are the chances you’d have to roll back all the way to 2020? You’d lose all your work. If you must keep them though, you’re better off downloading them for offline archiving.
If you want something easy to use use a WP plugin for it – I use BackWPup ([https://wordpress.org/plugins/backwpup/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/backwpup/)) Works pretty well once you set it up.
If possible have it upload the backup to something like Dropbox or Google drive, so if hostgator fails you still have your backup.
There is an option in updraft to either leave backup files on the server after uploading them to the remote, or to delete them. Could be that you just need to tell it to delete them.
Gap could be from that option being changed. If you look at your Google Drive, are they all there?
You can also tell Updraft to only keep xx total backups. Possible that you changed the settings, disabled Updraft, then re-enabled it and it left the old ones.
Really hard to know without logging in.
If I were you, I would go through the settings, actually reading each one, and make sure it looks how you want. Verify that the backups are saving remotely and delete everything from the server.