In this WordPress Video Tutorial for beginners, learn step by step how to backup your WordPress website, using the upDraftPlus plugin.

[box]Video Title: Best Backup Plugin
Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0511y0vkeo
Accompanying Course: Beginner’s Guide to WordPress – Web Design Course[/box]

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Transcript: 

The reason why, what’s the importance of the backup, why do we ever need a backup because for most people at least most hosting companies, they create a backup for you, they create an entire C panel back up if they happened to use C panel and most people think that, that’s perfectly fine but the thing is this is that a lot of times; it’s one thing, it’s good to be double [inaudible 00:46] just make sure to double check to make sure you have a local copy on your computer or on the external hard drive whatever may be. But sometimes things happened, right. If something happened with host for example, host cater the hosting company that we use there something happened about host cater service and all our backups are lost, well there’s nothing we can really do about it. There’s nobody that we can blame but ourselves, right. There’s not really that we can really do, they can try their best so that the file will be back if they can, if they can and so that’s one possibility.
The other possibility which is happened more likely is that sometimes you may go over your limits. I actually personally one over my limit of I’ve had too many files on my hosting account and depending on the actual hosting company, that hosting plan that you have, they may have certain restrictions and so it was telling me that for the past two months, actually it wasn’t storing a backup for me. Weekly, during that two months’ time, I was using another third party service, so I had backups of it and nothing happened during that two months but imagine that there something did, I would have absolutely no way to back up my website I will be pretty much be back to ground zero or at least back to the two months previous of all the lookouts I have lost. So it’s always good to have a copy that you can rely on that’s in your control either on our local hard drive on your computer or on your actual external hard drive, whatever it maybe; so it’s very important to have a backup.
We will be talking about finding best options for WordPress backup plug-in. There’s many, many plug ins that are out on the market. But we will be talking about three of them very quickly and they’re going to be using UpdraftPlus, that’s the free plug-in that we’ll be talking about. I’ll show you how it works.

So, the three things that we will be talking about is Vaultpress, Backup Buddy and UpdraftPlus. And so very quickly just the pricing, just to talk about that very quickly, Vaultpress is $5 a month or as low as $5 a month if you have just have one site. Back up Buddy is $80 per year but it includes two sites and UpDraftPlus is free.
Vaultpress is actually we use about one website and we just have the smallest time, the %5 plan that just good for just one website because usually they usually tried out for that one website. And it was just very simple to use, very easy to use and you can easy to use and all you have to do really sign up, it’s made by the same makers of WordPress. You can rely on it and it’s very simple to use like showing you how to make Gravatar, you just literally sign up by just literally sign up your account through your email and it takes everything else for you.

So virtually, no set up and it stores externally, so you don’t have to worry about. I love the services that were talking about. They store it on, for example, on your FTP or on–they expect you to use dropbox or amazon SU, whatever may be. These one’s stores entirely externally you can still download it and store a copy on your hard drive if that’s what you want but everything is just the external, so you can kind of rely. That has good and bad things. I think in my sense, in my case, it’s very good because you don’t have to worry about it and it’s all external. Don’t have to worry about going over any limits and it keeps—at least for the $5 panic keeps 30 backups, so it keeps for 30 days, 1 backup every single day.

The higher plan keeps more and things like that and it’s a very small upfront cost in my opinion but it has added up. I won’t say that it does add up but if you just pay month to month, $5 a month, it’s not as big as a commitment as some of the other back up services especially the plug in but this is the most important, it has great customer support. And that’s one thing that you really need with the backup service because if something goes wrong you can be very, very stress.

You will be very stress if something happened to your website, so you want something that you can rely on, somebody that you can talk to or that actually knows the company inside and out. And with three plug-ins, you’re not going to get that service, simply because, it’s free plug in, it makes sense. They don’t have the resources to really do that. You can pay for a premium membership to the free plug in but that no longer makes that free.So Vaultpress great support, so you can always count them through the answer any questions that you have. You need them to help restore something, and it is very easy.

Backup Buddy is also very easy to use. I would say that though still if we have a rank between the two, between Vaultpress and Backup Buddy, it is a little bit more difficult to set up but it’s definitely not hard to setup. Its stores on Amazon as three dropbox, FTP and a couple of thing [inaudible 00:05:21:02] like that. So it’s kind of under your control, it’s not just stored externally like in Vaultpress and it’s fully back up. And the cost is $80 upfront, so just like a plug in and it’s for two sites.
The only difference here is that you are not paying a monthly fee. So one thing that is good about this is that maybe if you have two sides just said just 1, the cost is no longer that big for Backup Buddy. If you compare this with the Vaultpress, $5 a month times 2, only serves 8 months, 8 months of coverage. But even this is $80 for the plug in. You got 1 year of support and updates and after that year, you can decide that you want to renew you cycle or you can just continue using it without any support, without any updates.

They don’t guarantee that those updates are going to be necessary or not to work with the latest version of WordPress. Chances are they may and may not, so that’s up to your discretion but that things said $80 upfront for 2 websites especially you need 2 websites to be backup, it’s not bad. It’s really not bad it may sound like a lot upfront but at the end of the day, it’s not that expensive and so definitely good options you have more websites than just 1 and also something where you need that good support and you need that customer service as well.

And the third thing that we are going to be talking about and the one the one that I actually show you how to use is called UPDraft Plus. And it’s very easy to set up, I will say that. It’s very easy to set up like Backup Buddy, it backups to this various Dropbox, AmazonS3, email, things like that. The one thing though, it is free. It’s free to use and it’s very easy to setup but the only thing that you are lacking is support.

Support is only available with the Pro account and so if anything ever goes wrong and you are not able to find the documentation that you need and you are not able to get the help that you need because chances are, if you are to email the UPDraft Plus theme, they will probably tell you at that point. Now, we would probably ask you to buy the Pro account. So that’s when support is very necessary but if you are looking for free option, I think that UpDraft plus in my opinion, it’s the best option for backup plug in for WordPress.

What we are going to do now is actually show you how to utilize UpDraft Plus, how to install it and how to actually create a back up for your WordPress website. And what we will be using is Updraft plus with the dropbox extension. It’s not really an extension but we will be using the Dropbox service. To download plug-in, very simply it’s called UpDraft Plus backup and reservation for WordPress, you can add search and just download plug-ins like the directory or you can download it from here. But I want you to show you is how many downloads it has, has a million downloads and has a very, very good review. So that’s one thing that you know you can trust it like but like I mentioned before because it’s a free plug in what you lack is support.

So what we will be doing is just looking at the settings of the UpDraft Plus and so what we will be doing is after you install it at the plug-ins, you just go settings and UPDraft Plus backups. So what I did is I just play around with here a little bit, so I set up dropbox with it. But pretty much, it’s very simple. All I did was going to settings and then I scroll down a little bit and this was originally select as none. So all I’m going to do is select Dropbox, then w’ree going to click save changes. And after we click save changes, that we’ll scroll back down and once it finishes loading, we want to go back to settings and we scroll back down and Dropbox should now show as it is being utilize and we just click on, after you have saved your settings and come back here and click this link to complete authentication.

And so may and may not as we start to authenticate again but if it does, you just press authenticate. And for you guys, it’s your first time setting it up, yes, you will click allow. And then, it set up all on the folder within Dropbox. So I set up this Dropbox and then apps and then the folder called UpDraft Plus. So right now, I actually have backups in here just simply because, I want to test and see how it works and so what we will be doing is all we have to do is, we are going to the current status, you also probably say no backups haven’t been stored yet. So you just click back up now.

Since you already set up dropbox and all you know is where you want to store it, it will do that for us. So we would just click backup now and it doesn’t take that long if your website is not that big. Chances are website maybe very big, so it takes very long but hopefully, it doesn’t. They can store it in dropbox itself. So from here, we can actually see all the existing backups we have, you see we have 2, we can store them have the blog, just take a look at the database plug in themes.

We can also go to the settings and so this is where you can schedule. So if you want a file backup interval or your database backup interval, you can set to– for example, daily I think will be very good, for issues and retain how many backups that you want to retain 5 of them or 4 of them and once you get pass that, you delete oldest one. So that’s how it works.

You can select what files you want to backup, database things like that. That’s not a huge amount of options but that’s also good and makes simpler first because a lot of plug-ins that I’ve used for the backup, plug ins are used quite difficult to figure out how they are work because there are so many options. This one is actually authenticating with Dropbox which was very, very easy. You just have to stand up those step processes and then you can just make your first backup. But don’t forget to save changes and like much before, if you need more support or you need support and additional features, that’s when you have to buy the premium version.

I check earlier the premium version was around $60 per personal license. So that’s when you come to the decision that you make just go ahead and invest in something like Backup Buddy or WordPress, things like that because the support will always be there. It’s up to you which one you want if you are looking for free options or paid options, it’s all up for you. If you do the free option definitely, I will suggest UPDraft Plus. If you want to do a paid version though either Backup Buddy or Vaultpress will be perfectly fine.