How to download backups from BackupBuddy on WP Engine

BackupBuddy is a popular plugin for taking snapshots of a site and its database.

If you use BackupBuddy on WP Engine, you’ll have noticed that you cannot download one of your backups by clicking its link — you get a “403 – Forbidden” message.

Why? Because anyone, anywhere on the Internet, without being logged in as an administrator, can download those backups! They would need to know the full URL to the backup, which includes a random string to prevent people from easily guessing those URLs, but still it’s still against our security policy if an anonymous client can download full backups of your database or files. So in our forward caching/proxy server layer we reject requests for those URLs.

But of course you need to be able to download those backup files! There’s at least two ways:

• Use SFTP. You have SFTP access to your entire installation, including your BackupBuddy backups. Just navigate to /wp-content/uploads/backupbuddy_backups and you’ll find all the backup files there.
• Use the BackupBuddy “Send file offsite” feature. As seen in the screenshot below, you can send any file somewhere else, like directly to Amazon S3, another FTP site, or similar.

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