Manually Restore a Jetpack VaultPress Backup

The manual restore process allows you to use your Jetpack VaultPress Backups to restore your WordPress site to any host on any server anywhere. 

Have you tried an automatic restore?

Jetpack VaultPress Backup makes restoring your site as easy as clicking a button. If you haven’t already attempted our one-click restore, please check out our documentation about Restoring with Jetpack VaultPress Backup.

Jetpack Support Scope doesn’t cover assisting with manual restores beyond the guidance provided in this documentation. If you need further assistance, please contact your hosting support for help.

How to Manually Restore Your Site

1. Before you can restore your WordPress data, you will need to ensure that WordPress is installed and functioning on your server.
2. Go to the Activity Log for your site.
   • For users with the Jetpack plugin, this means logging in to your WordPress.com dashboard and going to Jetpack → Activity Log. 
   • For users with the Jetpack VaultPress Backup plugin, this means going to cloud.jetpack.com → Activity Log.
3. Locate the backup you would like to download. You can do this by using the filters at the top of the Activity Log.
4. Download the backup.
   • For users with the full-featured Jetpack plugin, you’ll click Download.
   • For users with the Jetpack VaultPress Backup plugin, you’ll click Actions and then Download backup.
5. The backup that will download will be a compressed file with a .tar.gz file extension. To open this file you will need to unzip it. On Mac OS you can simply double-click the file. In Windows, you can use an archiving tool such as 7-Zip. The resulting folder will contain your data, divided into the following sub-folders: wp-content and sql. The wp-content folder contains these sub-folders: plugins, themes, and uploads.
6. Your plugins, themes, and uploads folders can be transferred via FTP or a File Manager tool to the wp-content folders on your WordPress site.
7. The SQL folder contains several .sql files, each representing a database table. For example, the wp_posts table will be represented by the wp_posts.sql file. You can import your .sql files into your MySQL database in a few different ways. It’s easiest to use something like phpMyAdmin or a desktop tool like Sequel Pro. If you have direct access to MySQL via the command line, you can run the following command:

mysql --user="username" --password="password" --hostname="mysql.yoursite.com" database_name < file_name.sql

8. If you’re restoring to an empty database, it’s often easier to join the .sql files into a single file.
   • In OS X: Launch Terminal.app and run the following command: cat *.sql > backup_db.sql
   • In Windows: Use the command prompt and run the following command: copy /b *.sql newfile.sql

You may see 2 files for each table in the sql folder: something like wp_posts.sql and wp_posts-updates.sql. If you are importing one-by-one, you should do the primary table first (wp_posts.sql) then the table labeled -updates.  If you’ve concatenated them all together as explained in step 7, there’s no need to worry about this.

Manually Restoring Your Site to a New Domain

When restoring your site to a new domain, you’ll need to update the siteurl and home values in your wp_options table. You can either edit the SQL (.sql) export file, or import the SQL and edit your database using phpMyAdmin or a desktop tool like Sequel Pro shown below.