BackupWordPress

BackupWordpress is a nifty little backup plugin. Once installed, you need to got to Sidebar > Tools > Backups to access your backups.

All backup schedules are shown here. This is pretty good as you can make different backup schedules for, say – taking a database only backup weekly and a full website backup at the end of every month. These backup schedules will show up over here.

To create a backup schedule, click on the ‘+ add schedule’ button on the top bar.

Here, you can customize the backup frequency, type of backup and email notifications. Note that the files + database backup can be pretty resource intensive and should be run sparingly.

Scheduling backups is very straightforward. You can create as many backup schedules as you want. Ideally you may want to take a database only backup every week and a full site backup every month. You can also customize the number of backups to keep in storage.

BackupWordpress, like other backup plugins may have difficulty running on managed hosting. Good thing is, this plugin is free so you can try it out on your server and see if it works.

Unlike BackupBuddy, this plugin doesn’t have any restoring guide available. So if your WordPress installation gets nuked and you’re left with the backup zip file, you may need a developer to restore it.

There’s a restoration guide here but it isn’t exactly straightforward. See the section below for more info.

Like other backup plugins, BackupWordpress has the option to exclude files and folders from the backup. However this feature is very clunky to use. For every file/folder you exclude, the page reloads.

Restoring backups on the same server from where the backup was taken is fairly straightforward. Restoring/migrating the backup to another server will take some technical know-how.

BackupWordpress has documented the process to restore a backup, however I recommend getting a developer’s help for this.

BackupWordpress doesn’t come with the option to send your backup to external destinations. For this, you need to either buy a one time paid upgrade for a single destination or get a paid plan which supports all external destinations.

They have three plans with different tiers for single site, multi site and developers. When selecting a plan, you need to select the external location you’re planning to send your backups to.

Currently, they have plans for:

• Google drive
• Dropbox
• Ftp/sFtp
• Amazon S3
• Dreamhost DreamObjects
• Rackspace Cloud
• MS Azure

Overall, Backupwordpress is a no frills backup package. The UI isn’t shoved in your face and the settings are discreetly placed inside Tools > Backups.

Scheduling backups is a breeze. The only issue is that there’s no straightforward way to restore backups. For that reason, I’ll only recommend this plugin to freelancers, developers and agencies.