UpdraftPlus

After installing, UpdraftPlus gets to the point pretty quickly.

Click on the big fat ‘backup now’ button to create a backup.

Like Backupbuddy, UpdraftPlus creates a log while making a backup. This is useful when the backup isn’t successful and you want to debug it.

To restore, go to the ‘existing backups’ tab. From there, you can individually restore themes, plugins, database, etc.

Personally, I feel like UpdraftPlus gives a lot of options here instead of highlighting a full backup/restore. It would be good if UpdraftPlus reworks its user interface to make it more straightforward in the future.

Updraft supports backing up to external locations. These are the supported locations:

• Dropbox
• Google Drive
• Amazon S3
• Rackspace
• OneDrive(paid)
• SFTP(paid
• MS Azure(paid)
• WebDav(paid)
• Updraft Vault(paid)

Of these, Google Drive and Dropbox are free as well as have generous space limits. By contract Updraft Vault(their own storage solution) gives only 1gb when you buy a license.

Restoring UpdraftPlus backups is fundamentally different from other backup plugins. Instead of having a single zip file containing the backups, UpdraftPlus divides them into theme, db, plugins, uploads and others zip files. You can always extract these zip files to manually restore backups in case something goes wrong.

To restore a backup on a new WordPress installation, you need to install UpdraftPlus and upload all the backup zips inside the wp-content/updraft folder of your new installation and go to the UpdraftPlus dashboard to restore them.

Nothing wrong with this but they could have set up a backup installer like how BackupupBuddy does.

UpdraftPlus supports file exclusions but the UI for it is horrible. Basically, it will takes a fair bit of time to set file exclusions.

Overall, the design of UpdraftPlus is reminiscent of those early 2010’s style buttons and UI components. They do get the job done; they’re just ugly to look at.

There are the FAQs where a comprehensive list of common questions are answered and WordPress.org forums where you can ask questions.

If you buy a license you’re entitled for paid support on their forums. The response time on that forum are pretty quick and the devs are fairly active over there too.

The core plugin is free but you can grab a license for paid support, 1 year of updates and 1gb of vault storage.

The paid version includes more than just the support. It also includes extensions which add more capabilities such as more external storage locations, migration tool for moving websites, backup encryptions, etc.