I can’t remember when I discovered BackWPup and for how long I’ve been using it. Back then, it was soley developed by Daniel Hüsken. When he realized that he does not have the time to work on the plugin just by himself anymore, he joined Inpsyde, the agency I currently work at (we are now called Syde), and brought the plugin with him. A little more than two year ago, the plugin was acquired my WP Media, the company behind plugins like WP Rocket, Imagify, and others. Even though many didn’t like the new UI WP Media introduced, I still use the plugin on many of my website.
What does BackWPup do?
It’s a backup plugin, so it is used to back up your site. In the free version, you can send backups to different targets. It supports:
- Email (which really only works for database backups)
- Microsoft Azure
- S3 providers
- Dropbox
- Rackspace
- SugarSync
- an external FTP server
- and the same server (which is not a good place for a backup)
In the premium version, it can also back up to more targets:
- Google Drive
- Amazon Glacier
- HiDrive
- OneDrive
In the past, restores were only available in the premium version, but they are now made available in the free version as well. But since I know how to restore a backup from files, I never used the restore functionality, as I don’t really know what it would all do. A recent version also added a migration feature, which I have never tested.
Why I use BackWPup?
There are many backup plugins out there. One reason I might (still) use BackWPup might be, that it was the one I first discovered. But I also like one of it’s core features: being able to set up multiple backup jobs. Many other backup plugins only have one job (one set of settings) which can run on a schedule. With BackWPup, you can set up as many backup jobs as you want. I have one that runs daily and that backs up the database. Another one does a full file system backup. For each job, you can decide where the files should be stored. So, you could have the database stored on an external service and sent to you by mail (if it’s really small), while the files are stored on an external storage that can hold a lot of data.
What are the alternatives I’ve tried?
On some websites, mostly those I do not maintain alone, we use UpdraftPlus (the free version). While it offers an easier UI and had a restore functionality in the free version for years (maybe even from the very beginning), I don’t like the limitation to only one backup job. It also only backs up the folders in wp-content by default and stores them in multiple ZIP files you need to download and extract separately. I’ve heard that the premium version can back up your whole installation, but since BackWPup also does that, there is no reason for me to switch, since I also don’t need a restore functionality. The only thing it offers in the free version that would be nice in BackWPup is the support for Google Drive.
Conclusion
Since I want to have multiple backup jobs and don’t need a plugin with a restore functionality, I have chosen BackWPup as my primary backup plugin many years ago and am still using it. Restoring from the (single) ZIP file is rather easy, if you work on the terminal anyways. If you use Local, you can even set up a local environment from the ZIP file directly. So if you are still looking for a (plugin) backup solution, give BackWPup a try.