How to Send XCloner Backups to Amazon S3

Posted on by vdrover

XCloner allows you to send your WordPress backups to remote storage locations including FTP, SFTP, DropBox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, WebDAV, Backblaze, Azure and more.

In a previous guide, we showed you how to send WordPress backups to Dropbox.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through sending a backup to Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service). This is a reliable and inexpensive way to store your backups away from your WordPress site.

Amazon prices start at under $25 per month for 1 TB of storage space. And, of course, the XCloner plugin is completely free!

Step #1. Set up your Amazon S3 account

Create Amazon Bucket
  • Give your bucket a name.
  • Click the orange “Create Bucket” button.
Amazon Bucket Name
  • In the top bar, find your account name.
  • In the dropdown menu, click “My Security Credentials”.
Security Credentials
  • Click the tab that says “Access keys (access key ID and secret access key)”.
  • Here you will be reminded of any existing access keys you have. Or you can click the blue “Create New Access Key” button.
Access Keys

Step #2. Set up XCloner for Amazon backups

Now we’re going to use our Amazon account details to connect XCloner to S3. Please make sure to enter these details exactly, or they won’t work.

  • In your WordPress site, go to “Site Backup”, then “Remote Storage”.
  • Click “S3 Storage”.
  • Enter your “S3 Key”.
  • Enter your “S3 Secret”.
  • Choose your “S3 Region”.
  • Enter your “S3 Bucket Name”.
Xcloner Details
  • Click the “Save Settings” button.
  • Click the “Verify” button.
  • If your details are correct, XCloner will show you this message:
S3 Valid

Step #3. Run a Test Backup

Let’s take a backup of our site and make sure it is sent to Amazon S3.

  • In your WordPress site, go to “Site Backup” and then “Generate Backups”.
  • You’ll see a backup process with 5 steps. These first three steps are beyond the scope of this tutorial: you can leave the defaults on for your test run.
Generate Backup
  • When you get to “4. Generate Backup”, you can click “Start Backup”. This will create the backup files that you can later send to Amazon.
Generate Backup
  • When the backup has finished, click the small cloud icon you can see in the image below:
Generate Backups Finished
  • You’ll see a “Remote Storage Transfer” modal window.
  • Choose “S3” from the dropdown.
Choose S3 Backup
  • Click the big green button on the right side.
  • You’ll see this message, “Uploading backup to the selected remote storage… “
  • When the process is finished, XCloner will show the message “done”.
S3 Backup Done
  • Head over to your Amazon S3 console and check your backup bucket.
  • Amazon will show your new backup file. Inside that tar folder, you will see all the files for your WordPress backup!
Backup Success S3

What’s next?

Congratulations! You’ve successfully sent your WordPress site backup to Amazon. If you like how this worked, you can use XCloner to schedule this backup to send to Amazon on a regular basis.

If you have more than one WordPress site, consider using Watchful.net to manage your sites. This guide shows you how to set up remote backups on Watchful. Watchful can make it a breeze to manage and track the backups of all your sites from one dashboard.