Tutorial — Daily Backup to Amazon S3

In this tutorial, you will set up a nightly backup of your WooCommerce data to Amazon S3. Every night at 2 AM, the plugin exports everything to CSV and uploads to your bucket.

Start from Quick Export to confirm entities and filters before saving the whole thing as a scheduled backup job.

Why This Setup

• Cheap — S3 storage is $0.023/GB/month
• Safe — S3 has 99.999999999% durability (11 nines)
• Automated — Runs on its own, no daily work
• Recoverable — If anything goes wrong, restore from S3

Scenario

• Small store with 1,000 products
• 50 new orders per day
• Want a daily backup of products, orders, customers

Time Required

About 30 minutes for full setup.

Prerequisites

• WordPress + WooCommerce + this plugin
• AWS account with S3 bucket
• Basic cron knowledge

Part 1 — Set Up AWS

Follow Amazon S3 Setup for full details.

Quick version:

1. Create bucket mystore-backups in AWS
2. Create IAM user with S3 write permission
3. Generate access key and secret key
4. Save in Settings → Cloud Storage & API → Amazon S3

Part 2 — Create the Products Backup Job

Step 1 — Open Jobs

WordPress admin → Webkul WC Addons → Jobs → Add New.

Step 2 — Tab 1: Source / Destination

The Job Editor's 6 tabs cover Source/Destination, Column Mapping, Transformations, Schedule, Notifications, and Run & Results.

Fill in:

Step 3 — S3 Destination Config

Access key and secret key are auto-filled from Settings. Leave blank to use defaults.

Step 4 — Tab 2: Column Mapping

For a backup, include all columns. Click Select All.

Or pick specific columns if you want a slimmer file.

Step 5 — Skip Tab 3 (Transformations)

No transformations needed for a backup.

Step 6 — Tab 4: Schedule

Step 7 — Tab 5: Notifications

You don't need success notifications — getting an email every day is noise.

Step 8 — Save

Click Save.

Part 3 — Create the Orders Backup Job

Repeat Part 2 but with:

• Job Title: Nightly Orders Backup
• Entity Type: Orders
• Path Prefix: orders/
• Filename Pattern: orders-{date}.csv

Schedule: Daily at 2:15 AM (15 minutes after products).

Part 4 — Create the Customers Backup Job

Same again with:

• Job Title: Nightly Customers Backup
• Entity Type: Customers
• Path Prefix: customers/
• Filename Pattern: customers-{date}.csv

Schedule: Daily at 2:30 AM.

Part 5 — Set Up Server Cron

WordPress cron fires unreliably on low-traffic sites. Set up real cron.

See Server Cron Setup.

Quick version — add to your server crontab:

*/5 * * * * curl -s https://your-site.com/wp-cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1

Part 6 — Test the Jobs

Step 1 — Run Each Manually

1. Jobs page → click Products Backup → click Run Now
2. Wait for completion
3. Check the History page
4. Verify run shows success

Step 2 — Check S3

1. AWS Console → S3 → your bucket
2. Open the products/ folder
3. You should see a file like products-2026-04-14.csv
4. Download and open it — verify data

Do the same for orders and customers.

Part 7 — Set Up S3 Lifecycle Policy (Save Money)

Old backups do not need to sit in hot S3 storage. Move to cheaper Glacier after 30 days.

Step 1

AWS Console → S3 → your bucket → Management → Lifecycle rules.

Step 2

Click Create lifecycle rule.

Step 3

Fill in:

Step 4

Actions:

• Transition to Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 30 days
• Delete (expire) after 365 days

Saves about 80% on storage costs for old backups.

Part 8 — Restore From Backup

If you ever need to restore:

Step 1 — Download from S3

AWS Console → S3 → your bucket → products/ → pick the right date → Download.

Or via AWS CLI:

aws s3 cp s3://mystore-backups/products/products-2026-04-10.csv ./

Step 2 — Import Back

1. WordPress admin → Quick Import
2. Entity: Products
3. Mode: Replace (wipe everything, use this backup)
   • OR Create + Update (merge the backup into existing data)
4. Upload the CSV
5. Start Import

Part 9 — Monitoring

Email Alerts on Failure

You already set this up in Part 2 Step 7. Test it:

1. Break something (e.g., change the S3 bucket name temporarily)
2. Run the job manually
3. Check your email for the failure alert

Check History Weekly

Once a week:

1. Go to Jobs page
2. Check Last Run column for each backup job
3. Any "Failed" → investigate

Check S3 Storage

Once a month:

1. AWS Console → S3 → your bucket → Metrics
2. Check total size
3. Confirm lifecycle rules are working

Cost Estimate

For a store with 1,000 products, 50 orders/day:

• Products CSV: ~200 KB × 365 days = 73 MB / year
• Orders CSV: ~10 MB × 365 days = 3.6 GB / year
• Customers CSV: ~100 KB × 365 days = 36 MB / year

Total: ~4 GB / year.

S3 cost:

• Hot storage (first 30 days): ~$0.10/month
• Glacier (after 30 days): ~$0.01/month
• Total: about $2 per year

Cheaper than coffee.

Advanced — Multiple Sites

Using multiple WooCommerce sites? Set up one S3 bucket per site:

• mystore1-backups
• mystore2-backups

Each site gets its own IAM user scoped to its own bucket.

Or use a single bucket with paths:

• store1/products/
• store2/products/

Troubleshooting

Related Pages

• Amazon S3 Setup
• Jobs
• Server Cron Setup
• Quick Export