Everybody out there who had a website at a certain point knows how mind-boggling running it can be, and how many hours it can take. Even a ballpark estimate can give you the picture of all those working days you’ve lost, a piece of information which can be pretty daunting once the website is attacked, and once you’ve lost all of your valuable information.
Losing your data is actually much easier than you can imagine – one day, you may wake up and be unable to open your website at all, and even if you manage to restart it, odds are big you’ve lost important database files (if not all of them).
And yes – you’re not the first one who thought it will never happen to him, and you’d be shocked to understand just how often it can occur.
Most of the time, it won’t even take an attack to bring your website down: failure can be due to many reasons:
– The obvious malware infections that will require you to shut down the site in order to solve the problem.
– Credit card expiration you had no idea about, which however caused your hosting services to stop, and your account to be deleted.
– Unintentional mistakes, either by you or your host. Can’t deny this happens, can you?
Don’t trust your host’s backup promises blindly
Even if we’re discussing the most reputable and trustworthy host, disasters happen all the time, and in this case, you may turn out to be the victim of your own confidence.
If nothing else, hosts usually back up the front page only, and we recommend you to examine the process in any case. Reading the terms of service may end up revealing that the holder of the complete liability and responsibility for an eventual failure is you.
Therefore, the first thing to do when running a WordPress website is to find, install, configure, and activate specific plugins which can backup and protect your content. Instead of covering damage, try to prevent it, and install these plugins as soon as possible.
There are many backup plugins out there, so research carefully before you’ve chosen the best one for your website. In this article, we’ve listed some of the best free backup plugins that work on WordPress websites, most of them requiring only basic tech knowledge.
1. WP DB Backup
We wouldn’t be surprised if you had little or no knowledge concerning the WP DB Backup, as the information concerning it is very poor. Still, the lack of an appropriate marketing campaign doesn’t make this plugin unpopular, and many big and established websites rely on it to protect their data.
If you’re a tinker or a code geek, let us share the good news that the plugin’s source code is available on GitHub. Once you’ve installed it on your WordPress website, it will become as visible as the other plugins you have.
As you can understand by the name, WP-DB-Backup protects the database and not exactly the files. In case you want to protect them too, you may want to give a look to our alternative solutions.
2. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus has both a paid and an unpaid version. The later one, as basic as it is, still has all the necessary backup features to make it rank the highest among WordPress.org backup plugins. The premium one, as expected, is packed with amazing and innovative features which provide a whole new level of data protection.
Just recently, the plugin became extendable and is, therefore, good enough to suit the needs of any business. In addition, you can always purchase a variety of add-ons to make the site more functional, as for instance to introduce migrators, duplicators, divide data between multiple storage destinations, and introduce advanced reporting.
There is also a multitude of storage services which can make strong backups possible in every location you want.
Another distinctive advantage of UpdraftPlus is its capacity to ease and simplify both the backup and the restoration process. You can easily backup in the cloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, FTP, Rackspace Cloud, OpenStack Swift, DreamObjects, and much more. Most of the time, it will take a single click to restore all information, and all database and files will have different backup schedules.
The biggest difference to the premium version is that it also allows you to backup to Google Cloud Storage, WebDav, SCP, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft OneDrive, and SFTP.
3. BackWPUp
If you ask users which are the most popular WordPress backup plugin, the most common answer will certainly be BackWPUp. The thing that makes BackWPUp so preferred is its simplicity, and the possibility to automate both backups and restorations and enable them on any device.
At the same time, BackWPUp is so powerful that it can protect complete installations, cover as well /wp-content/ and send its data to an external backup service, as for example FTP, S3, Dropbox, and so on.
The same as in the previous case, BackWPUp has a premium version with an enlarged package of protection features, such as scanning, repairing, optimizing files, and so on.
4. Duplicator
Duplicator does much more than simply backing up your data – it duplicates literally everything there is on your WordPress website. Its power is more than considerable, which is probably why more than 500.000 users have installed it, and its current rating is almost excellent (4.9 stars!).
Thanks to this plugin, you can copy, clone, migrate, or redirect content between websites, which will do an awesome job for those looking to eliminate redundancy any time the website may go down or fail temporarily.
5. BackUpWordPress
BackUpWordPress is another top notch representative of the excellent backup plugin category, even if it is often considered to be less powerful compared to Updraft Plus. What makes it really popular is that it is absolutely free, and its admirable 4.7-star ranking has brought it more than 200,000 downloads so far.
As such BackUpWordPress makes for the perfect plugin to install and forget about it – the features will simply do the magic without you interfering.
6. blogVault Real-time Backup
blogVault is what we would call a free, simple, and automated WordPress backup solution.
As it backs them up, the plugin sends files directly to Dropbox, but you have to consider the need to set it up first which may not be as easy as you’re used to with similar plugins. Luckily, it really doesn’t take that much time.
Even if it did require some efforts, we’d still consider it worth of them, and that’s because this plugin won’t use local storage at all. Basically, it won’t consume any of your blog’s memory, and it won’t exhaust your resources.
7. WordPress Backup to Dropbox
WordPress Backup to Dropbox (WB2D) is among the simplest plugins whose purpose is exactly as indicated in its name: to transfer files to Dropbox, and keep them there.
The setup process is once again painless: you have to install it, log into your Dropbox/OAuth account, and adjust backup settings the way you want them to be) you will get to choose applicable/exclusive files, frequency, timing, and so on).
8. myRepono WordPress Backup Plugin
Rather than a plugin, myRepono is an online service which makes it possible to automate backup for all WordPress and database content, including separate posts, user information, comments, tags, plugins, WordPress PHP, and so on.
9. CYAN Backup
CYAN is one more plugin you’ve probably never heard off, but it has even more than what it takes to be the ideal solution for your backup requirements. Being an extension to the Total Backup solution, CYAN is chosen by many users in the last couple of years to update and backup content.
What makes CYAN so good is that it can perform a backup at varying intervals, including daily, weekly, and monthly ones. The most popular option is to allow it to backup data every four hours, which is not something many free plugins can do.
10. XCloner – Backup and Restore
The restoring component called XCloner is designed specifically for MySQL and PHP websites, but it can also work naturally with Joomla and WordPress.
What is specific about it is its ability to subject to Open Source standards (MySQL, TAR, and others) in order to ensure that backup can be performed in many different ways, keeping you in total control of your content, and granting an incredible level of flexibility.
Regular backup is a must! It’s the best thing you can to do to run a safe website. What plugin or service do you use for WordPress backup? Let us know in the comments section!
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