Free Plugins To Backup Your Wordpress Sites
How important to have backup files?
Your website is your business. Protecting your website is protecting your business! .
If your website is unreachable for the day for any reason, it literally means your business is closed for that day. It also means there is no income from that site for that day.
There are instances when you need to fall back to your previous latest version of your wordpress websites. Your site was hacked, server glitches and crashes, hosting company finally decide to discontinue the services are only a few instances where you need your backup files.
It is your responsibility to back up your website. WA has site-support to assist with site issues but when it comes to retrieving the last version of your website, I believe their resources are quite limited.
So here are the popular FREE wordpress backup plugins to help you backup your site to ensure if there is something wrong hits your website, you have a contingency plan. Shortly, it is super important to always have your site backed-up.
Free Backup Plugins
UpdraftsPlus - FREE and Premium (optional)
The plugin is one of the most popular scheduled backup plugin with more than 2,500 installation as per today. It allows you to do schedule as well as on-demand backups.
A great feature of this plugin is that you can store your backup to storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email.
For more features, there is paid version which you need to pay one-off fee. It also comes with a lot of add-ons. Depends on your requirements, they offer 4 premium packaged - Personal ($70 for 2 sites), Business-$95, Agency $145 and Enterprise ($245 for unlimited sited).
BackWPUp - FREE & Premium
Almost similar to UpdraftPlus,
It also comes with paid version which ranging from Standard ($69) to Agency ($349).
BackUpWordPress - FREE
The plugin allows automatic scheduled backups. The drawback of this plugin is it does not allow the backup files to store to cloud storage services.
Duplicator- FREE
This is a really cool plugin for migration of wordpress sites.
It has backup features that you can use to back up your Wordpress site.
WP-DB-Backup FREE
This is one of the most popular backup plugins. However, it only backup your core WP database tables. You can store the backup file to your computer or sent to your email address.
Premium Backup Plugins
There are also many Premium Backup plugins but I only share two of them here
(No affiliate links).
BackupBuddy - Premium
- comprehensive backup plugin that backup all your wordpress files including theme, posts, pages, widgets etc.
- one off $80 (1 site) to $197 (unlimited sites)
- schedule - daily, weekly or month
- you can use this plugin to duplicate, migrate and restore website
Vaultpress (with Jetpack) - Premium
- This comes with the purchase of Jetpack which gives you access to other premium features like site migration, monthly backup, protection against spammers etc
- There is trial account but there is no backup feature included.
- starting prices of $39 per year for personal sites to business pack of $99 and $299 per year.
I do hope this post is useful to my WA comrades .
What backup plugin have you installed on your wordpress sites?
Let's Work Smarter
✌(-‿-)✌Joe
Recent Comments
62
I use the WP plugin "Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions" to trim the amount of space my website is using.
I use the WP plugin "All-in-One WP Migration", the backup option to back up my website. I download the file it generates to my laptop. I keep the last 3 or 4 of them and delete the rest.
Also, within the plugin, I only keep the last 3 or 4 of them and delete the rest. Note that to restore and if the file size is greater than 512 MB, you have to buy an upgrade. My file size is smaller than this, so this is not a consideration for me, but may be for you.
Your comment has definitely added value to this David. Thanks a lot. You are right, most of the free plugin limits the file size you can backup.
:)
Thank you Joe. Do you know if the free ones also back up comments? No all of them do.
Marion Black recommends one whose name has escaped me for the moment because i have not backed up my site yet. ....but this post has reminded me I should do it asap. Thanks Joe
I am not sure if the Free versions do backup comments too but let me search and will come back to you if I find something.
Thanks for stopping by ... :)
I have contacted site-support to see what they got to say about this. They confirmed that the sites in WA has backups files including comments files.
So far, I can't verify that the free version plugins also do backup comments.
Hi Joe. Thanks for asking the question for me. I really appreciate that.
I migrated from my old SiteRubix account to my own Domain day - yeah! This makes today a "Birthday" of sorts. Anyway, the migration is actually a "one button job" from the same screen as you when log in via WA.
So far all 40 posts and 500 odd comments have moved across nicely - my menu came over in 1 piece as well which actually surprised me.
Anyway, I am just going through and cleaning up different links / legal pages and pointers now.
Thanks again Joe. Wishing you lots of success.
You are making a leap progress. Happy to hear that.
40 posts sound good pack for a website to start monetizing.
Wishing you a great success with the site.
:)
Awesome Joe, great reference information, and another one bookmarked under 'Joe's Training". Check!
Very useful post, which I will pay close attention to, very informative, as for plugins on my site, so far, pretty links, EWWW image, YOAST and another couple making 5 in total, and in line with the training here, though after reading this, that will have to be revised.
If you are hosting your sites at WA there is no need. You are automatically backed up every day.
Rob, thanks for the comments, it's one area I wasn't sure about here if that happened or not, but if it does happen automatically then that is well cool and another plus point for transferring blogs here
Thanks for pointing it out
I have confirmed with site-support that the server incorporates backups to sites hosted here. At the same time, he advised that it is a good practice to have our own backup stored on our computer. Knowing that, I believe it's personal preference whether to have our own backup as contingency plan or rely on the backups provided by WA.
:)
Joe
Fantastic @robg1, I didn't know that Thank you @newmarketpro for your post, very thorough and informative.
Hi, Joe...yes, it's free. I've used it a few times, and without any trouble.
I'm not sure, but I think it has some limitations on just how large the website can be so the plugin can backup properly.
Mine's still small, so I'm fine for now :)
James
See more comments
Yes and you should create a post from this and connect it to my post about needing to backup. We could quote and reference each other's post creating a backlink.
Take a look at my post:
Menu Heading - Getting Online.
Post: 49% of Users Don't Backup Up their Website or Computer
Let me know what you think.
Great idea Steven. Definitely it will add value to this one. Backup - Security and Peace of MInd p/s- In future you may just add your related post to mine, Steven. I would definitely appreciate that. :)
No not the WA blog posts let's connect them on our public websites?
Take a look at my website the URL is under my bio. Then go to:
Menu Heading - Getting Online.
Post: 49% of Users Don't Backup Up their Website or Computer
This is much more developed. Let me know when you turn that post into a full-blown website article.
o okay Steven.
Sorry my bad understanding.
Actually for blog posts here I did not write them into full article for my site. In fact my MMO site was quite inactive as my focus is more on other sites.
That's tickled my mind - 'why not'. Thanks for the idea. Will let you know when I posted anything to the site and see if we can exchange links.
Thanks Steven.
:)
Joe
Hi Joe,
I first wrote the WA post and got such good response to it that I wrote the post for my site. Same order as you.