Managing ShortPixel backups

ShortPixel optimizes and compresses your images to improve site speed without sacrificing visible quality.

Understanding ShortPixel backups

By default, ShortPixel stores backup copies of original, unoptimized images on your server. These are useful in a couple of scenarios: 

• When you're first starting to use the plugin and deciding which settings work best for your site, the backups allow you to quickly revert to the original photos in order to try different settings.
  
  
• If recommendations for image scaling change in the future, you will be able to change your settings without having to re-upload all of the images. 

However, ShortPixel backups can eventually consume a significant amount of disk space, which can lead to site availability issues. If your site uses a lot of images and storage is a concern, we recommend moving these backups to their own, separate storage so that they doesn't impact the disk space on your server. This additional storage is $0.20/GB/month and usually adds just $2-3/month to your total cost.

Removing ShortPixel backups

You might decide that you don't want to keep ShortPixel backups around long-term. If so, you can disable and delete the backup functionality. If you do decide to disable/delete ShortPixel backups, please be sure you retain original versions of your images somewhere, such as your own computer or a backup drive, if it's important to you to have original versions of your images accessible. Without backups enabled, ShortPixel will delete originals after it optimizes them, and you won't be able to get an original version back unless you retain your own backups.

If you would like to delete and disable ShortPixel backups, you can follow these steps:

Clearing Out Existing Backups

Clear out the backups folder by going to Settings → ShortPixel. Click on the Statistics tab, and then the Empty backups button. This will immediately free up the space those backups are using.

Disabling Backups

Click the General tab and uncheck the Save and keep a backup of your original images in a separate folder button.