Functionality
Once installed, Backupbuddy will give you two backup options – database only and full backup. I recommend doing the full backup for the first time unless your website is very large. It will also show you past backups you have created.

The actual backup creation process is pretty straightforward. Backupbuddy will show you the steps taken to create a backup and once done, it will ask you to download the backup zip file.
If there are any errors, it will update the status log with the error code which you can look up in their error pages.

Once you take a backup, go to the Sidebar > Backupbuddy > Restore/Migrate and download the importbuddy.php file. It will ask to set a password after which you can download the importbuddy.php file.
To restore, paste both the backup zip file and the importbuddy.php file in your root webserver directory. For this example, lets say you paste these two files in you local webserver which you can access at localhost. Now go to localhost/importbuddy.php. A webpage will open up asking for the password you set earlier. Once done, it will guide you through the process. You just need your database name, user and password to complete this guide.
An important thing to note: All backup zip files are stored inside your wp_uploads folder. Making multiple backups will increase the size of this folder exponentially. If you’re running out of space, just delete older backups from the Backupbuddy dashboard.
There are some really useful features in here.
- The backup creation screen shows the status of the backup process. This is nice – not many backup plugins show this so you can never estimate how much time the backup creation process is gonna take. Also, it saves logs
- You can exclude files and folders from your WordPress installation. I recommend excluding folders of themes you’re not going to use again as this can speed up the backup creation process. For developers – if you have node_modules, bower_modules, etc folders in your theme directory, exclude them as they most certainly will crash the backup creation process.
- There’s also a bonus malware scanner provides which is powered by Sucuri.