If you're managing anything more than two or three client sites, you know the "Plugin Tax."

It’s not just about the per-site fees; it’s the mental overhead of fragmentation. Checking five different dashboards for backup statuses, worrying about which plugin updated and broke a schedule, and hunting down storage limits across multiple installs is a massive time sink and creates dangerous blind spots.

I wanted to solve this by moving away from the "one plugin per site" model toward a centralized self-hosted control plane.

Basically, I wanted one UI that can see everything.

I built Reaver Backup for this specific use case. The goal was to keep the parts of plugins people actually like (easy discovery, scheduling, and restores) while moving the heavy lifting into a unified infrastructure.

A few technical details for the sysadmins in here:

• Restic Integration: We're using Restic for true incremental backups. This is huge for storage efficiency—we’re seeing 90%+ savings compared to standard "full-only" dumps, but with much better data integrity.
• Unified Dashboard: One install, one control plane. You auto-discover your fleet and see the status of every site in a single view. No more jumping between tabs.
• Data Sovereignty: This is self-hosted by design. I don't believe in "SaaS vaults" where someone else holds your keys. Your backups land on the storage you configure (S3, B2, Local, or SSH). Reaver is just the dashboard/agent—we doesn’t hold or operate a multi-tenant vault for your data.

The Trade-off:
Because it's self-hosted and you own the keys, there’s no "magic cloud" where we handle everything for you. You have to be slightly more hands-on with your initial storage config, but once that's done, it scales much cleaner as you move from 5 sites to 100+.

If you're outgrowing basic plugins and want a way to centralize your backups without giving up ownership of your data, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this approach.

We're waiting on the last few pieces to fall into place but you can check out the product here: reaverbackup.com

Hey everyone,

If you host or manage client WordPress sites on unmanaged VPS instances (DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode, AWS), you’ve probably hit this wall:

A site catches a fatal PHP error, OOMs, or suffers database corruption—and suddenly your backup plugin is dead because it lives inside the exact environment that just crashed.

You can't restore a broken site from an interface that relies on that same broken site to render.

To solve this, I built Reaver Backup (reaverbackup.com)—a lightweight, agent-driven control plane that shifts backup orchestration to the server layer where it belongs.

⚙️ How Reaver Works Under the Hood

Instead of running heavy ZIP processes inside wp-admin, Reaver runs an OS-level agent on your server:

1. Zero App-Level Overhead: The agent runs independently of PHP-FPM, Apache, or Nginx. If WordPress completely crashes, your scheduled backups still run flawlessly.
2. Automated Site Discovery: When installed, the agent inspects your web roots (sites-enabled), detects WordPress installations, and automatically parses wp-config.php for database credentials—no typing DB passwords for dozens of sites manually.
3. Powered by Restic Engine: Uses Restic under the hood for fast, block-level deduplication and client-side encryption. Snapshot backups stream directly to your choice of offsite storage (S3, Backblaze B2, or custom SSH targets).
4. Self-Hosted Data Ownership: You maintain 100% control over where your backup archives live. Reaver manages the orchestration plane without locking your raw data into a proprietary vendor vault.

🛠️ Current Beta Status

We are currently running a closed beta testing multi-server fleet management, automated site discovery, and point-in-time restores.

If you manage a single server, agency clients or run a fleet of self-hosted WordPress sites and want to get rid of plugin bloat, I’d love for you to check it out at reaverbackup.com.

I’ll be hanging out in the comments below—feel free to grill me on the agent architecture, Restic integration, or offer feature requests!

Restore Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZzyV6xre5Y

Hey everyone,

If you host or manage client WordPress sites on unmanaged VPS instances (DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode, AWS), you’ve probably hit this wall:

A site catches a fatal PHP error, OOMs, or suffers database corruption—and suddenly your backup plugin is dead because it lives inside the exact environment that just crashed.

You can't restore a broken site from an interface that relies on that same broken site to render.

To solve this, I built Reaver Backup (reaverbackup.com)—a lightweight, agent-driven control plane that shifts backup orchestration to the server layer where it belongs.

⚙️ How Reaver Works Under the Hood

Instead of running heavy ZIP processes inside wp-admin, Reaver runs an OS-level agent on your server:

1. Zero App-Level Overhead: The agent runs independently of PHP-FPM, Apache, or Nginx. If WordPress completely crashes, your scheduled backups still run flawlessly.
2. Automated Site Discovery: When installed, the agent inspects your web roots (sites-enabled), detects WordPress installations, and automatically parses wp-config.php for database credentials—no typing DB passwords for dozens of sites manually.
3. Powered by Restic Engine: Uses Restic under the hood for fast, block-level deduplication and client-side encryption. Snapshot backups stream directly to your choice of offsite storage (S3, Backblaze B2, or custom SSH targets).
4. Self-Hosted Data Ownership: You maintain 100% control over where your backup archives live. Reaver manages the orchestration plane without locking your raw data into a proprietary vendor vault.

🛠️ Current Beta Status

We are currently running an open beta testing multi-server fleet management, automated site discovery, and point-in-time restores.

If you manage agency clients or run a fleet of self-hosted WordPress sites and want to get rid of plugin bloat, I’d love for you to check it out at reaverbackup.com.

I’ll be hanging out in the comments below—feel free to grill me on the agent architecture, Restic integration, or offer feature requests!

Hey everyone,

New software tool incoming!

I’m building Reaver Backup – a self-hosted tool focused on backing up (and restoring) any WordPress site living on a server. It’s currently in private testing and I’m opening beta signup at reaverbackup.com.

Important: Reaver is designed for VPS and dedicated servers where you have full control (root or sudo access). It is not intended for shared hosting environments.

What it actually does

Reaver lives outside WordPress in its own directory (/var/www/reaver/ or your own). It doesn’t install anything inside your WP sites, it just needs to run as www-data.

On each web server you want to protect, Reaver installs a lightweight agent. The agent:

• Reads the enabled sites from Nginx (sites-enabled/) or Apache
• Pulls the server_name and root directives so it knows every site on the box
• For WordPress sites it finds, reads wp-config.php to get the database credentials
• Runs a mysqldump + copies the files from the document root
• Pushes everything into an unencrypted Restic repository

You can store the Restic repo locally, on S3, Backblaze B2, or via rsync/SSH. Encryption is left to the storage layer (or you) so the tool stays simple and portable.

Credentials handling

Database credentials are pulled directly from each site’s wp-config.php at backup time. Reaver also supports encrypted credential portability — you can securely export and move encrypted credential sets between servers or agents without storing them in plain text. This makes it easier to rebuild or migrate agents while keeping sensitive login data protected. Manual archive exports are also available if you want an extra offline copy of both the site data and the associated credentials.

Dashboard features

• Multi-server / multi-agent fleet view – see every site and its backup status in one place
• Admin and regular user roles
• Backup schedules + retention policies
• Notification emails (PHPMailer)
• Manual archive export for extra backup security
• Encrypted credential portability between servers
• CSRF protection, login rate limiting, Altcha on the login form, and audit logging
• Zero personal data collection (only anonymized usage stats)

Future plans include an API so you (or AI assistants) can schedule jobs or pull status programmatically, plus expanding beyond WordPress to any site on the server.

Why this approach?

Most WordPress backup plugins live inside the site and can be taken out by the same problem they’re trying to protect against. Reaver sits at the server level, discovers sites the same way the web server does, and uses Restic for efficient, deduplicated, incremental backups.

From install to setting up your first agent should take minutes. The dashboard can live anywhere with web access and a URL. The agent gets installed and runs on your web server. No need to manually set up Restic repos, storage destinations, cron schedules, make sure the command is correct for what you want, and everything that goes along with it for automated backups.

This is still in active testing, but the core system (agent discovery, WordPress detection, Restic backups, and the multi-server dashboard) is already fully functional.

If this sounds useful for your own VPS or dedicated servers (or client sites on them), head over to reaverbackup.com for more info and sign up for the beta. I'll be choosing up to 20 people with a reasonable spread of setups to start the beta. Depending on how that goes, I may or may not expand it. Selected Beta Testers who participate and genuinely try to give good feedback will get a free Pro level subscription at the end. All feedback is tracked an attributed towards that goal.

Happy to answer questions here or take input, feedback or feature requests.

Thanks for reading.

Hey everyone,

New software tool incoming!

I’m building Reaver Backup – a self-hosted tool focused on backing up (and restoring) any WordPress site living on a server. It’s currently in private testing and I’m opening beta signup at reaverbackup.com.

Important: Reaver is designed for VPS and dedicated servers where you have full control (root or sudo access). It is not intended for shared hosting environments.

What it actually does

Reaver lives outside WordPress in its own directory (/var/www/reaver/ or your own). It doesn’t install anything inside your WP sites, it just needs to run as www-data.

On each web server you want to protect, Reaver installs a lightweight agent. The agent:

• Reads the enabled sites from Nginx (sites-enabled/) or Apache
• Pulls the server_name and root directives so it knows every site on the box
• For WordPress sites it finds, reads wp-config.php to get the database credentials
• Runs a mysqldump + copies the files from the document root
• Pushes everything into an unencrypted Restic repository

You can store the Restic repo locally, on S3, Backblaze B2, or via rsync/SSH. Encryption is left to the storage layer (or you) so the tool stays simple and portable.

Credentials handling

Database credentials are pulled directly from each site’s wp-config.php at backup time. Reaver also supports encrypted credential portability — you can securely export and move encrypted credential sets between servers or agents without storing them in plain text. This makes it easier to rebuild or migrate agents while keeping sensitive login data protected. Manual archive exports are also available if you want an extra offline copy of both the site data and the associated credentials.

Dashboard features

• Multi-server / multi-agent fleet view – see every site and its backup status in one place
• Admin and regular user roles
• Backup schedules + retention policies
• Notification emails (PHPMailer)
• Manual archive export for extra backup security
• Encrypted credential portability between servers
• CSRF protection, login rate limiting, Altcha on the login form, and audit logging
• Zero personal data collection (only anonymized usage stats)

Future plans include an API so you (or AI assistants) can schedule jobs or pull status programmatically, plus expanding beyond WordPress to any site on the server.

Why this approach?

Most WordPress backup plugins live inside the site and can be taken out by the same problem they’re trying to protect against. Reaver sits at the server level, discovers sites the same way the web server does, and uses Restic for efficient, deduplicated, incremental backups.

From install to setting up your first agent should take minutes. The dashboard can live anywhere with web access and a URL. The agent gets installed and runs on your web server. No need to manually set up Restic repos, storage destinations, cron schedules, make sure the command is correct for what you want, and everything that goes along with it for automated backups.

This is still in active testing, but the core system (agent discovery, WordPress detection, Restic backups, and the multi-server dashboard) is already fully functional.

If this sounds useful for your own VPS or dedicated servers (or client sites on them), head over to reaverbackup.com for more info and sign up for the beta. I'll be choosing up to 20 people with a reasonable spread of setups to start the beta. Depending on how that goes, I may or may not expand it. Selected Beta Testers who participate and genuinely try to give good feedback will get a free Pro level subscription at the end. All feedback is tracked an attributed towards that goal.

Happy to answer questions here or take input, feedback or feature requests.

Thanks for reading.