The Best WordPress Backup Plugins Compared

With the increase of website attacks, now more than ever, there's a need to take regular and real-time backups of your website. There are some great WordPress plugins available that will give you peace of mind that you have a full working copy of your site that you can roll back to if you experience any issues. Backups play a critical part of your regular WordPress maintenance tasks, so it's important to get right!

In this article, we compare 5 of the best WordPress backup plugins side-by-side. Before we dig into the most popular backup plugins available, let's first look at some of the key features we'd expect to see in a good backup plugin.

Key Backup Plugins Features to Look For Automatic Backups

The principal task of any backup plugin is automatic backups, which is the ability to set the time at which a regular backup would be performed. Generally, every backup plugin comes with this option, since this is what every developer or owner of a website usually looks for.

Real-time Backups

What if you could monitor your site and synchronize your latest changes with your backups? The VaultPress plugin can do this, as well as scan your site for possible security issues.

Automatically Resume Failed Backups

With this feature, failed backups are detected and automatically resumed. The UpDraftPlus plugin features automatically resuming failed backups, which can be important for some users.

Multiple Site Support

Normally, a user with multiple websites wants backups of these websites in one place. For them, plugins that come with a feature to manage backups of multiple WordPress websites is advantageous. The VaultPress plugin supports this.

Backup Storage to Dropbox, Azure and Other External Backup Sources

Storage of the backup of your website on an external source would help you in recovering it easily in case of any issue with your server, or unintentional deletion of files. The BackWPup plugin stores backups to Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, Microsoft Azure, SugaSync, Google Drive and Amazon Glacier.

Checks and Repairs the Database

Some plugins can check and optimize your database. Moreover, some plugins can also repair your database. BackWPup provides this feature.

Migrations

Some backup plugins can restore and migrate backups from other backup plugins. UpDraftPlus (Premium) restores and migrates backups from backup plugins such as BackWPUp, BackupWordPress, Simple Backup, and WordPress Backup To Dropbox.

Statistics

Not an essential feature, but some backup plugins such as VaultPress provide handy statistics, which can be useful for client reporting.

Backup Archive

The UpDraftPlus plugin allows you to split large sites into multiple archives, if you're working with bigger sites, this will be a critical feature.

Language Support

Language support is important in order to gather and engage a wider audience. For example, the WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin is available in 19 languages.

It's worth mentioning that all of these plugins have different pricing structures. Do your own research and choose what best suits your needs.

WordPress Backup Plugins VaultPress

Active Installs: 20,000+

VaultPress is now in its 5th year, and to celebrate, they have an extended 3 month trial. The plugin provides real-time backups and even scans your website for security threats. I would definitely recommend this plugin, especially for its security scanning and spam protection features.

Some of its features include:

Daily backups

Real-time syncing of your WordPress website content

Daily security scans with one-click repairs. This also leads to easier review and in fixing threats

Protection from spam (under security bundle)

Statistics related to the site's most productive and popular times based on post and comment activity

Downloadable backups

BackWPup

Active Installs: 400,000+

For the backup of a complete installation including /wp-content/ and saving it on an external backup service such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, and others, I'd recommend using BackWPup. There is also a Pro version available that has more features.

Features include:

With a single backup .zip file you are able to easily restore an installation

WordPress XML Export

Optimizes, checks and repairs the database

Backups in zip, tar, tar.gz, tar.bz2 format (needs gz, bz2, Zip Archive)

Store backups to a directory, FTP server, Dropbox, Microsoft Azure, SugarSync, and Rackspace Cloud

Also store backups to Amazon Glacier, Google Drive, but this feature is only available in the PRO version

Sends logs and backups by email and also provides multisite support only as network administrator

Available in 5 languages

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

Active Installs: 100,000+

A great plugin to backup your website on regular basis, you just have to select a time. It has the following features:

Select how many times you want to backup on regular basis

Automatically backup your files and SQL dump on Dropbox

Exclude files which you don't want to include in the backup

Select the location where your backup will be stored within Dropbox

OAuth support, so your Dropbox account details are not stored

Supports 19 languages

UpdraftPlus

Active Installs: 500,000+

UpdraftPlus is a plugin that you can create a complete backup of your website. After this, you can store it on the cloud or download the backup on your computer. At the time of writing, it's the number 1 most installed scheduled backup plugin, according to WordPress.org.

Some of its features include:

Backups to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Rackspace Cloud Files, Google Drive, Google Cloud Storage, DreamHost DreamObjects, FTP, OpenStack (Swift) and email

Provides file and database backups

Backup the website automatically on a repeating schedule, the plugin can restore and migrate backup sets from other backup plugins (premium version only)

Files and database backups can have separate schedules

Encrypt database backups for security (premium version only)

The uploads failed are automatically resumed

Download backup archives direct from your WordPress dashboard

BackUpWordPress

Active Installs: 200,000+

Another popular backup plugin, BackUpWordPress has the following features:

Easy to use and setup

You can also manage multiple schedules

It uses zip and mysqldump for faster backups (on availability)

Works on Linux & Windows Server

Can work in shared host environment

Also emails every backup file

Translations for 13 languages: Spanish, German, Chinese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Lithuanian, Italian, Czech, Dutch, French, Basque

Summary

In this article, I've covered 5 of the best backup plugins for WordPress. I also wanted to include PressBackup, but unfortunately it wasn't available for the current version of WordPress at the time of writing. I'd definitely recommend VaultPress and UpDraftPlus. However, the others also have some unique features as shown in the summary below.

VaultPress

Realtime syncing of all your WordPress content

Provides statistics related to the website

Daily security scans with one-click repairs, easy review and fix threats

Protects from spam

BackWPup

WordPress XML Export

Optimize and also checks and repairs the database

Backups in zip, tar, tar.gz, tar.bz2 format

Stores backups to different external backup sources

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

Select how many times you want to backup on a regular basis

Select the place where your backup will be stored within Dropbox

It uses OAuth, so your Dropbox account details are not stored

Translation in 19 languages

UpdraftPlus

Supports WordPress backups to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Rackspace Cloud Files, Google Drive, and some others

Encrypts database backups for security (for premium version)

The uploads failed are automatically resumed/retried

BackUpWordPress

You can also manage multiple schedules

It uses zip and mysqldump for faster backups (on availability)

Also email every backup file

What about you? What backup plugins have you used and would you recommend?

Source: The Best WordPress Backup Plugins Compared