WordPress for Cowork ships with an automatic daily backup so you don’t need to think about it. Backups also run on demand whenever you (or Claude) trigger them:
- Automatic daily. A scheduled WP-Cron event fires once a day at ~3 AM site time and runs
wp_backupserver-side. No setup required after plugin install. - On demand. You ask: “Back up my site.” Claude runs
wp_backupand saves a full JSON snapshot. - Pre-flight prompt. On the first destructive action in a Cowork session, the plugin asks if you want a backup first. Say yes once and you’re covered for the rest of the session.
- Custom schedule. Ask Claude to set up a Cowork scheduled task — e.g. “back up my WordPress site every Sunday at 2am”.
Retention. Snapshots are kept on a rolling schedule: 7 daily, 4 weekly, and 12 monthly. Older ones auto-prune. Snapshots live on your WordPress site (in wp-content/uploads/wpfc-backups/, .htaccess-protected so only the plugin can read them) — not on a third-party cloud and not on your local machine.
Listing & restoring. Ask Claude: “List my recent backups,” then “restore from backup <id>.” Before restoring, ask Claude to investigate the problem first — most outages have a small surgical fix (deactivate one plugin, whitelist an IP) that doesn’t require rolling the site back.
Disk space. Each snapshot is typically 1–5 MB for a content site, more for media-heavy sites. If your host is tight on disk, see Backup failed — disk full or permission error in this knowledge base.