How to take a backup before any risky change

Before updating a plugin, theme, or core software — or making any change you are not completely confident about — take a manual backup first, even if a scheduled one ran last night. A nightly backup protects you from disaster. A backup taken sixty seconds before you click "update" protects you from the far more common event: the update itself going wrong.

Why last night's backup is not enough

A scheduled backup answers "what happened yesterday". It does not cover anything you changed today, which for a pre-update backup is exactly the point in time you most need covered. If an update breaks something, restoring last night's backup would also undo everything else you did today that had nothing to do with the update. A backup taken immediately before the change lets you undo just the change.

What this backup actually needs

It does not need to be elaborate — the goal is a fast, complete undo button, not a permanent archive.

• A full manual backup through the backups section of your control panel is the simplest option, and covers files and database together in one action.
• If you know exactly which files and database tables the change touches — a single plugin, for instance — a targeted copy of just that plugin's folder plus a quick database export can be faster, provided you are confident that is really all the change affects.

After the update

Load the site and check the specific thing you changed, plus a couple of pages that have nothing to do with it — updates occasionally have side effects outside the area you touched. If everything looks right, you can let this backup roll into your normal rotation or discard it. If something is wrong, restore from the copy you just took rather than the last scheduled one, since it gets you back to exactly where you started with nothing else lost.

Make this a habit rather than a one-off and it stops feeling like extra work — how often to back up generally covers where a pre-change backup fits alongside a regular schedule.