Making a backup regularly is strongly recommended if you have a WordPress website or are responsible of managing a WordPress website. In doing so, you have two options to choose from. First, you can use the manual method — which requires access to the hosting service where your website is hosted on. Second, you can use a backup plugin which offers a simpler solution than manual backup.
If you want to use the second option, then you need a reliable backup plugin to do the job. In WordPress itself, there are always multiple options for every plugin type. Backup plugin is no exception. Backuply is one of the options you can try if you are looking for a backup plugin for your WordPress site.
What is Backuply? A Brief Intro
Backuply is a simple backup plugin. It is developed by the same company that develops Softaculous — the tool you usually use when installing WordPress on a cPanel-based hosting service. With Backuply, you can make both manual backup and scheduled backup of your WordPress site. However, in case you want to make a manual backup, you don’t need to login to your hosting provider or make an FTP connection on FileZilla and other FTP client apps. Instead, you just need to click a button and Backuply will do the rest.
Once the backing up process is done, you can download the backup file to your computer.
Backuply itself is released as a freemium plugin. The free version, of course, comes with fewer features than the pro version. The option to make a scheduled backup is only available on the pro version of Backuply. The free version of Backuply is available on WordPress.org.
What Can the Free Version Do?
As mentioned above, the free version of Backuply allows you to backup your WordPress website manually. Backuply offers two options you can choose before making the backup. You can choose the full backup (WordPress files and database) or backup the WordPress files or database only.
Before starting the backup, you can go to the Settings page to select which part to be included on the backup. Under the Exclude Settings section, you can find two columns to exclude database tables and files. Interestingly, Backuply detects the database tables belong to the plugins that are no longer exist on your website. So, you can exclude them to simplify your database.
As you can see on the following screenshot, Backuply shows up some database tables belong Easy Digital Downloads, which is no longer installed on the website we use.
On the right column on the of the Exclude Settings section, you can select which folders or files you want to exclude from the backup. You can simply click the Exclude Specific Folder button to select folders or files to be excluded. A popup window will appear after you can click the button. You can select the folders/files from this window.
Backuply allows you to select multiple files with certain criteria. For instance, you can select all files that have an extension of .jpg. Or, you can also select multiple files contain “wp” letters on their file names. To use this feature, you can click the Exclude a pattern button beneath the Exclude Specific Folder button.
The feature allows you to select multiple files based on the following criteria:
- File extension (e.g., JPG, htaccess, PNG, etc.)
- Has certain letters on the file name prefix
- Has certain letters on the file name suffix
Downloading and Restoring a Backup
After you have at least one backup, you can either download the backup file or restore it. You can download the backup file to have extra copy of the backup file on your computer. This is a great step just in case something unexpected suddenly happens to your server.
For the restore option, you can use it to have the normal version of your website back in case it is currently experiencing an error due to misconfiguration or cyberattack. To download or restore a backup, you can go to the Backup History tab on the Backuply screen on your WordPress dashboard. You can also delete a backup when no longer needed.
Backup Locations
By default, Backuply stores your backup files locally on your hosting server. The path of the backup folder itself is public_html/wp-content/backuply/backups. If you use a hosting plan that has limited storage space, this can be a huge problem. To address it, you can store the backup files to a remote location.
The free version of Backuply offers two remote locations you can choose from: Google Drive and FTP server. To add a new backup location, you can go to the Backup Locations tab on the Backuply screen on your WordPress dashboard.
Backuply Pro Features
As stated above, Backuply is released as a freemium plugin. The free version only allows you to backup your website manually. Also, you have only three backup locations (local, Google Drive, and FTP).
You can unlock more Backuply features by upgrading to the pro version. Two extra features you can unlock after upgrading to the version are scheduled backup and more backup locations:
Scheduled Backup
Setting a scheduled backup is extremely recommended if you have a running business website. It can minimize the risk on an unexpected situation like server crash, site misconfiguration, or cyber-attack. After upgrading to the version of Backuply, you can unlock the scheduled backup feature, which you can find under Settings tab on the Backuply screen.
The scheduled backup feature of Backuply itself allows you to automatically backup your website based on the following time spans:
- Every 30 minutes
- Every one hour
- Every two hours
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Custom span
In addition, you can set a backup rotation before you set a scheduled backup.
More Backup Locations
With the pro version, you have more location options to store your backup files, other than Google Drive, local storage, and FTP. Here are extra locations available on the pro version of Backuply:
- Backuply Cloud
- SFTP server
- Dropbox
- OneDrive
- Amazon S3
- WebDAV server
As you can see on the above list, Backuply offers a dedicated cloud service to store your backup files. There are three storage space options you can choose from as follows:
- 10 GB – 1 Site
- 25 GB – 5 Sites
- 100 GB – Unlimited Sites
If you run out of storage space, there are extra space plans that Backuply offers.
Another feature available on the pro version is WP CLI, which you can use to run some administration-related CLI commands.
How to Backup Your WordPress Website Using Backuply
Being a freemium plugin, you don’t need to spend a dime to access the basic features of Backuply. If you are okay with manual backup, then the free version is enough. After all, the free version already allows you to store your backup files to an external location (Google Drive).
Before being able to use Backuply, you definitely need to install it on your WordPress website first. Backuply is available on plugin repository of WordPress.org so that you can install it directly on your WordPress dashboard.
Go to Plugins -> Add New on your WordPress to start the installation process. Type “Backuply” on the search box to find Backuply. Once you found it, hit the Install Now button.
Activate Backuply right away once it’s installed.
Start the Backup
Once Backuply is successfully installed and activated, you can start to make the backup. But first, you need to make some settings to set the backup location and scheduled backup span if you use pro version. You can access the Backuply settings by going to Backuply -> Dashboard on your WordPress dashboard. Click the Settings tab on the Backuply screen. Here, you can set things like folder/files to be excluded, database tables to be exluded, scheduled backup span, and so on — as we have mentioned earlier above.
While to set the backup location, you can go to the Backup Locations tab.
If you want to store your backup files to Backuply Cloud service, you can go to Backuply -> Backuply Cloud on your WordPress dashboard to activate your Backuply Cloud key.
Once everything is ready, you can start to make the backup.
— Manual Backup
To make a manual backup, you can go to the Dashboard tab on the Backuply screen. Select the components you want to make the backup of (folders-files or database. Or both). Select the backup location from the dropdown menu and click the Create Backup button.
Wait until Backuply is done backup up your website. Once the progress bar shows the number of 100%, you can click the Finish button.
To download your backup files, you can go to the Backup History tab on the Backuply screen. Pick a backup date and click the Download button to download it. Backuply will download your backup file in a .tar.gz format instead of .zip.
— Scheduled Backup
The scheduled backup feature of Backuply allows you to automatically create a new backup of your website every certain span according to your setting. In order to make Backuply do the job, you need to set the time span of the scheduled backup.
First go to the Settings tab on the Backuply screen. On the Auto Backup Settings section, select a time span, the components you want to backup, and backup rotation. Once done, click the Save Settings button at the bottom to apply the changes.
That’s it. Backuply will automatically create a new backup according to the time span you have set. You can access the backup files by going to the Backup History tab on the Backly screen.
The Bottom Line
Whether you own a site or someone who is responsible of taking care of a website, making backups is a part or you job. By having backups of your website, you can restore your website on unexpected events like misconfiguration, server crash, and so on so that your business won’t stop to operate. In WordPress, there are two routes to backup your website: manual and scheduled.
If you use a hosting service that doesn’t offer a backup feature, you can install a backup plugin to make everything easier. Backuply is one of the backup plugins you can use. The plugin allows you backup your website from the directly from the WordPress dashboard. It allows you to backup your website be it manually or automatically thanks to its scheduled backup feature.
There are a lot of backup locations you can choose from. From local storage, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, to Amazon S3. The best part about Backuply is that you can access the basic features for free so there is no risk you need to bear with. You can upgrade to the pro version only when you need to access the pro features.
