Schedules, retention and recovery points

Manual backups are for before you do something risky. Schedules are what keep you protected every day, and retention keeps storage from growing forever.

Create a schedule

1. Go to Chada Backup → Schedules and click Add schedule.
2. Choose a frequency — daily, weekly or monthly — and the time of day it should run.
3. Pick the components to include and the destinations to upload to.
4. Save. The card shows the next run and, after the first run, the last result.

Scheduled jobs are dispatched by WP-Cron. If your host disables WP-Cron, trigger it from a real cron job (wp cron event run --due-now, or wp chada-backup tick to advance the job runner directly).

Multiple schedules and split cadence (Premium)

The free tier runs one schedule. Premium lets you add as many as you need, which unlocks the pattern most sites actually want: database nightly, files weekly. Your database changes every hour; your uploads folder mostly doesn’t — so back them up at different cadences and keep both storage and run time small.

Retention

Retention is set under Settings → Retention and applies per destination, so you can keep, say, 14 sets locally and 60 in S3. The default is to keep the newest 14 sets. Pruning runs after each successful backup; you can also prune by hand:

wp chada-backup prune --keep=10

Pre-update recovery points (Premium)

With recovery points enabled (Schedules → Pre-update recovery points), Chada Backup automatically captures a backup before WordPress applies a core, plugin or theme update. Fresh installs don’t trigger a capture — only updates do. The capture has a time budget (90 seconds by default) so an update is never blocked for long; if the budget runs out, the update proceeds and you’re notified that the capture was skipped.

Recovery points are retained in their own bucket, separate from ordinary scheduled sets (the newest 5 by default), on every destination. That means a burst of plugin updates can’t push your scheduled backups out of retention — and vice versa.

Exclusions

Under Settings → Exclusions you can skip paths and patterns (cache folders, *.log, node_modules/ and the upgrade/ folder are excluded by default) and leave out specific database tables — handy for large log or session tables you don’t need in a restore.

Notifications

Failure emails are always available and go to the address under Settings → Notifications (the site admin email by default). Premium adds success emails and a webhook URL that receives a JSON payload after every job — useful for monitoring dashboards and chat alerts.