Your first backup
The Dashboard is home: it shows your protection status at the top and the backup history below it. Creating a backup is a single step.
Back up now
- Open Chada Backup → Dashboard and click Back Up Now.
- Choose the components to include. All are selected by default: Database, Plugins, Themes, Uploads, WordPress core and Other wp-content. Estimated sizes are shown next to each.
- Tick the destinations the backup should be uploaded to. Local storage is always written; remote destinations you have configured appear as checkboxes.
- Click Start Backup.
Watching progress
The Dashboard hero turns into a live progress view with the job’s steps — Scanning files → Backing up database → Archiving files → Uploading → Finishing — the current step’s progress, overall percentage, elapsed time and size so far. A collapsible live log streams the details.
You can leave the page. Jobs run in short, time-boxed steps driven by a background kicker (and WP-Cron as a fallback), checkpoint after every step, and resume automatically. Come back later and the Dashboard picks up the job where it is. While a job runs, a small status chip with the percentage also appears in the admin bar.
If a backup fails
A failed job shows the failing step and a plain-language reason (for example, “Upload to Backblaze B2 timed out”). Use Resume to continue from the last completed step — you don’t have to start over — or open the log for details. A dismissible notice also appears in wp-admin, and a failure email is sent to the configured recipient (the site admin email by default).
What a backup set contains
A backup set is several files, not one big archive: a manifest.json describing the set (components, sizes, site URL, table prefix, SHA-256 checksum of every file) plus a gzipped SQL dump for the database and one ZIP per file component. Large components such as uploads are split into parts (500 MB each by default). Every set is verified against its manifest and shown with a Verified checkmark in the history once the checksums match.
Download a backup
Click Download on any set in the history to open the download drawer, which lists every file with its size — download them individually or all at once. These files can be imported into Chada Backup on another site (see Restoring a backup). If a set only exists on a remote destination, the plugin fetches it from remote storage first and shows that progress.
From the command line
wp chada-backup run # full backup to all enabled destinations
wp chada-backup run --components=db,uploads --destinations=none
wp chada-backup list # backup sets in history
wp chada-backup list --verify # re-hash every file against its manifest