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If you aren't already you really should be backing up your WordPress site. Backups are often overlooked but are a critical aspect of any website. Imagine if you have 6 months of post you suddenly lose as you've been hacked or your database has been corrupted by an update, and you don't have a backup available. That isn't a good situation to be in. Luckily, with the use of a few plugins and a solid backup strategy in place that never needs to be you.

Deciding On A Backup Strategy

While you could just install a backup plugin and be done with it, that's not the right approach if you want a viable backup strategy you can actually fall back on. First, you'll want to decide how often you want to backup your WordPress site. This will vary site to site depending on how often it's updated being the most important factor. If your site is a blog and you post a few times a week you may decide to run a daily backup. Then you may decide to also run a monthly backup.

But why run a monthly backup when you're running a daily backup you ask? For one, the content may be different. Just because you're running a daily backup that might not including backing up everything on your website.

Maybe you're just backing up blog posts and comments. But what about theme options, plugin options, plugins, registered users, etc. A site is much more than just posts and comments even if you don't typically view it as such.

Once you have set in your mind how often you want to backup, you'll want to decide which type of backup you want. Either you can backup everything again each time you backup, or you can run what's known as incremental backups. Unlike backing up everything again, incremental backups only backup what's changed and often you keep one zip which is the incremental backup which is overwritten each time a new incremental backup is run.

There are positives and negatives to using incremental backups. The main negative being that you never have a restore point to a certain date or time. If you suddenly want to restore your site from two months ago as you had maybe a different theme or custom functionality you lost that you want back. You wouldn't be able to do that with an incremental backup you'd just have yesterdays backup with what changed including that new theme you no longer like.

The main positive being the space saving. Backups take up a bunch of space, make no doubt about it.

 

By the time you've included all your media, pages, posts, users and comments, backups, even compressed, can be climbing to the 2GB+ range per backup.

 

If you keep even just 10 backups, that's 20GB+ of backups only. Now, if you went with an incremental backup solution, you'd have just the one backup final. Saving you space on your web-server. There is no right or wrong approach to going Incremental or non-incremental. It's ultimately a matter of choice and will vary depending on how much space you have available and what type of website you run.

WordPress Backup Plugins & Solutions

• UpdraftPlus - Price $0-$145

UpdraftPlus is a WordPress backup plugin that offers both a free and premium version with a full feature set including everything you need to be confident with your backup. Out the box, it supports Google Drive, Dropbox, AWS, and Rackspace to send your Backups too. Meaning you don't have to rely on your server or host to securely host and keep the backups. The best feature of Updraft Plus though has to be it's Multisite support.

Hacking, server crashes, dodgy updates or simple user error can ruin your site. That’s why you need UpdraftPlus: https://t.co/pHkXCr7FTB

— UpdraftPlus (@UpdraftPlus) March 29, 2017

Most WordPress Backup Plugins can't backup individual sites and restore individual sites. UpdraftPlus can, though! Meaning if you have a multisite and want a solid backup plugin you can't go far wrong with UpdraftPlus. It should be noted that the Multisite functionality is only available in the premium version.

• VaultPress - Price from $3.50/month

VaultPress is a secure hosted Backup solution created by Automattic. Simply install the plugin on your site, connect it to VaultPress and you're away!

One additional feature of VaultPress compared to most other backup plugins is it's security functionality.

VaultPress scans your site daily for changed files and security vulnerabilities alerting you when somethings wrong. You can restore any backup at any time. VaultPress Premium is now incorporated into JetPack premium, meaning one of the only downsides to the service is if you don't like or don't want JetPack to connect. Overall though VaultPress is a solid hosted backup solution for your mission critical WordPress website.

• Snapshot Pro - Price $49 month including 10GB of cloud space and all other plugins/themes.

Snapshot Pro is a backup solution by WPMU DEV, offering good value for money and a strong feature set.  For $49/month you get access to all their plugins and themes along with 10GB of cloud space for your backups included and support 24/7. Just like with Updraft, Snapshot supports Amazon S3 and Google Drive storage solutions for storing your backups as well as  one click restores and multisite support. Additionally, if you want you can purchase additional Cloud backup space at any time!

Snapshot also allows you to automatically delete backups such as only keeping the most recent few and you can exclude specific tables and files!

• BackupBuddy - Price from $80 for 1 site.

BackupBuddy has been available since 2010 meaning it's had seven years of on-going development making it a solid solution for backing up your WordPress site. Just as you'd expect from a backup plugin, you can one-click restore, store files remotely including Amazon S3 and Google Drive and schedule backups. 

BuB can take care of updating the #WordPress settings and database if you want to move your site to another domain - https://t.co/lPLYxQNf1H

— BackupBuddy (@Backup_Buddy) April 1, 2017

iThemes (the developers behind BackupBuddy) also offer BackupBuddy Stash; a hosted secured remote option to store your backups on. While BackupBuddy is a solid solution it may not be suitable for most beginners, there are tons of options, and it may prove to be overwhelming to a lot of users.

• BackUpWordPress - Price $free

BackUpWordPress is without a doubt one of, if not my favorite backup plugin. It doesn't have a crazy complex array of options. It doesn't have a ton of fancy features. But what it does have is a solid backup system that makes it simple and easy to use for anyone.

It just works, supports multiple scheduled backups at once and can even email your backups to you. You can't get much better for free.

Not only that, but it works anywhere you know some backup plugins that require a ton of space, memory, and libraries? BackUpWordPress doesn't.  It is a solid free plugin which also beats most premium plugins. If all you want is a simple backup solution that works. BackUpWordPress is the perfect solution for you.

Testing Your Backups

It's not just good enough to have backups running and stored. You should be regularly testing your backups on staging domains and check that they have backed up successfully and include everything you need. You don't want to be backing up your site for a year, need one of the backups and then realize the backup is corrupted or doesn't work.

Conclusion

Backups are an essential part of any WordPress site and are something you definitely should be doing, whether you use a free or premium solution. You can never have too many backups. Are you already using a Backup plugin? Have a Backup story you'd like to tell? Let us know in the comments below.