Backing up WordPress sites is one aspect that should never be overlooked. There are many plugins for managing backups in WordPress. UpdraftPlus is the one I prefer because of its ease of use and very useful features, present in the free version.
The Premium version offers some interesting options and is an optimized version of the free version. These options of the Premium version are very useful, especially for managing several websites at the same time, or even for migrating your WordPress site.
Downloading and Installing UpdraftPlus in WordPress
In the admin menu, go to Plugins > Add New. Then write the name of the plugin in the search engine and validate the search. You can then choose the first plugin:
We can observe that this plugin is very popular since there are more than 3 million active installations, and it enjoys an excellentrating of 4.8/5 with more than 6000 comments:
You install the plugin, then you need to activate it. You will then see that a new sub-menu has appeared in your WordPress panel: Settings > UpdraftPlus Backups.
Make a first backup of your website with UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus simplifies things to the extreme in favor of beginners since several emerging windows tell us how to make a first backup. We can even take a tour of the plugin’s functionality. But to perform our first backup, we’ll just click the “BACKUP NOW” button:
We observe that two boxes are already checked:
– The first box concerns the database, where our content, the various settings of the website, and information relating to user accounts are stored.
– The second box concerns the files of the WordPress site, i.e. themes, extensions and media files (photos and videos).
– The third box is unchecked: it concerns the manual deletion of backups.
We leave these first two boxes checked and the third box unchecked, then we validate by clicking again on a “BACKUP NOW” button.
If the operation goes well, we should see a blue gauge representing the progress of the backup:
Once the backup is done, we have access to various information and options. We can click on the “GO TO SETTINGS” button.
UpdraftPlus settings
Creating automatic backups
After clicking on “GO TO SETTINGS” we can create automatic backups, specifying their periodicity: manual mode, every 2 hours, 4 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours, daily, bi-weekly, weekly or monthly backups.
It should also specify the number of backups that will be present at any time. These settings can be made separately for the database and for the website files. For my part, I chose the number of 4 backups, with a daily periodicity, whether for the database or for the files of the website.
Storage of backups
Backups can of course be uploaded to our web server as well as to our computer. But an interesting option is to perform remote storage. To do this, the plugin allows you to connect to different storage spaces in order to automatically send a copy of your backups there. You will simply need to authenticate to the desired service and give authorization to UpdraftPlus.
There is a wide choice for this storage: Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Cloud, Amazon S3 and S3-Compatible, Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, FTP, OpenStack, Rackspace Cloud Files, DreamObjects, Blackblaze, Administrator email (be careful to the weight of backups!), SFTP/SCP, DreamObjects, and finally webDAV.
The Premium version has even more choices, including a specific storage, UpdraftPlus Vault, owned by the UpdraftPlus company. The Premium version even allows the use of several remote storages at the same time. But we must admit that the free version is already particularly interesting.
The advantages of the Premium version
We can still note four other important advantages of the Premium version:
– Encryption of database backups, adding a layer of security to your data.
– Incremental backups: much more efficient and faster than a total backup, incremental backups allow you to save only the files modified in relation to the previous backup, thus having the great advantage of saving both time and money. disk space.
– Cloning or migrating your website
– The management of several websites at the same time.
More details between the free version and the Premium version here .
Prices for the Premium version start from $70 for the “Personal” version, valid for 2 websites, with each annual renewal costing $42. For an unlimited number of websites, the “Enterprise” version costs $195 ($117 for annual renewal).
How to restore backups
Once again, UpdraftPlus makes it easy for us since to restore a backup, we just have to select a backup (in general, it will be the latest), then choose the desired files (you should choose all the files to perform a full backup):
Here we can see that our restore was successful.
How to migrate a WordPress site to another server using the “Updraft Migrator” plugin
UpdraftPlus offers a specific plugin to migrate your WordPress sites: “Updraft Migrator“.
Comparisons Between WordPress Backup Plugins
UpdraftPlus VS BackWPup
UpdraftPlus VS WP Vivid
UpdraftPlus VS Jetpack
UpdraftPlus FAQs
More details on this page .
Conclusion
UpdraftPlus is really a very useful WordPress plugin with many features, and offers us great ease of use thanks to very clear menus and options.
This plugin has several points in common with another that I find really indispensable when it comes to security: WP Cerber. These two plugins are indeed very complete from their free version, they are reliable, very easy to use, and they are systematically installed on all my WordPress sites because of all their qualities.
