Friday, May 10, 2013

A Fast & Lightweight Wordpress Backup Plugin

As we all know, backing up a hosted Wordpress site is an important thing to do. But there are a huge number of plug-ins can help you effectively backup your website and prepare for any future problems. The only thing is, there’s so many of these plug-ins, it’s hard to know where to begin and often.

Not all backup plugins can properly run especially when the Wordpress site is hosted on a cheap shared hosting (usually it's unlimited/unmetered space and bandwidth) or a free hosting server. A hosting service like this shares its resources to many users and has some limitations to memory and network usages.

I've tried some high rated backup plugins such as XCloner and UpdraftPlus Backup. But they were unable to completely backup my free hosted Wordpress site. They kept stopping or became idle after a few minutes backing up. And then my site gone inaccessible for a few hours due to server limitations on memory usages.

Luckily, there's a lighweight Wordpress backup plugin I had been testing, namely "Backup". This one actually came out tops when searching for "backup" plugins on WordPress.org. It backs up your entire WordPress installation including widgets, themes, plugins, files and SQL database - the entire package. You can schedule backups and have them sent off-site to Google Drive. You can then download them right to your desktop.

The plugin requires at least version 3.4 of Wordpress. Although it has not been updated since more than 8 months ago and only compatible with Wordpress up to version 3.4.2 according to its author, the plugin works properly on my Wordpress version 3.5.1. And it's hosted on a free shared hosting server!


Plugin URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backup/

Pros:
  • Scheduling system for backups
  • Allow you to select what you want backing up
  • Can store backups on Google Drive or locally
  • Email notifications when an error occurs
  • Easy to use
  • Free
Cons:
  • No options for Dropbox or Amazon S3 for backup storage.
  • No restore options. Restoration must be done manually through cPanel.
  • Need to manually setup an API Access to Google Drive.
Posted by at
Labels: , ,

1 comment:

  1. UnknownMay 16, 2013 at 8:19 PM

    Good article. Here is another backup option. Checkout this WordPress solution that backs up your site to an Amazon S3 secured server for free and the setup is done for you. And optionally, you can pay a low monthly fee to Update your WordPress core files and plugins, monitor your website for Uptime, get security scanning, get Malware cleaning , get email reports with website traffic statistics, and update your website menus and content: http://www.wp-monitor.com/

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)