Rethinking Website Backup Policies After a WordPress Plugin Issue
A WordPress Plugin Issue
A WordPress plugin update recently gave me a good reason to think carefully about website backups.
The plugin in question is Print Invoice & Delivery Notes for WooCommerce — a plugin that generates PDFs such as invoices, delivery notes, and receipts for WooCommerce. We use it on several client sites.
Print Invoice & Delivery Notes for WooCommerce ↗︎
After updating from v6 to v7 — a major version update — the plugin stopped working properly. I downloaded v6 from the plugin’s archive page and attempted a downgrade, but all the previously configured settings were gone. In the end, I had to restore the entire environment from a previous WordPress backup. And not just for one site — I had to do the same for every site running this plugin. It was a significant amount of work, but we got through it because we had been keeping consistent backups. Without them, there would have been no way to recover the original environment.
Updating Our Backup Policy
This experience prompted us to revisit our backup policy. We had been keeping 5 days of automatic backups on the server — we’ve now expanded that to 15 days. This gives us more room to respond to plugin issues like this one, and having 15 days of data on the server also makes it easier to manually transfer the 1st and 15th of each month to external storage as part of our regular workflow.
Our updated backup policy is as follows:
- CMS (WordPress) sites:
- Server: automatic backup at 2:00 AM daily, retaining 15 days (previously 5 days)
External storage: twice a month (1st and 15th), 6 snapshots total (approx. 3 months)
*Actual retention may vary depending on available storage capacity and site data size.
- Non-CMS sites:
- Data saved to external storage at launch and each update, up to 6 snapshots (no change)
Clients on our Website Regular Support WordPress and SimpleTastes plans have already been moved to the new policy as of the end of April 2026.
A Note on the Plugin Developers
To come back to where we started — after v7 was released, error reports began appearing in the support forum one after another. The development team responded quickly, and as of May 20, 2026, they have already released v7.1.2. For a free plugin, that kind of responsiveness is genuinely impressive, regardless of whether the developers are a software company or not. We have a lot of respect for that.
We plan to stay on v6 a little longer and upgrade to v7 when the timing feels right.
Finally
Situations like this one are difficult to handle on your own. Monitoring a plugin’s support forum and deciding when it’s safe to update is no simple task. And certainly not something AI can simply solve for you.
Based in Kurashiki, Okayama, AEDI offers Website Regular Support and Website Regular Support WordPress plans designed to handle exactly these kinds of issues. If you’re a client who doesn’t yet have a maintenance contract with us, or if you’re looking for a web design company in Okayama that also takes care of ongoing site maintenance, we’d love to hear from you.
Our sister brand SimpleTastes offers affordable, high-quality, and full-featured websites, with backup and maintenance included as part of the annual management fee. Please feel free to consider that option as well.
