It is always safe if you are backup your website regular basis. So how to backup your WordPress website automatically. on this point, Updraft plus comes in handy.
Let’s find out how to use the free version of the Updraft plus plugin for making backups of your website. And even, scheduling backups of your website to make it more automated for you.
We’re getting started right now.
How to install Updraft
Install Updraft plus is simple. All you got to do is, go to plugins and add new, then search for Updraft plus, or just Updraft should bring it up as well.
If you are new to WordPress, I’m suggesting if you want to be extra safe, make sure you backup your site and your database before installing any new plugins, including this one.
Click on Install Now, and then click on activate. Now You can head over to settings, and in there, you will find Updraft plus backups. Click on that to open the settings. There aren’t a lot of settings. It’s a pretty simple plugin.
You can buy these premium extensions. But the free is more than good enough to backup your site.
Let’s see you want to backup right now when you’re on this page. All you have to do is click on backup now. If we head over to settings, we can schedule our backups. First two sections, we can choose backup files and databases separately.
Usually, I back up both of them weekly and retain two backups.
So if we are back up today, there will be two backups. So the third backup will be deleted, and the most recent two will be kept.
You can’t pick specific days and times with the free version. There is a premium add-on. You can find out under the premium tab to choose particular days and times to do your backups.
With a free version, you can choose an interval, and those intervals are listed in the dropdown menu.
Depending on how many times you publish, that should determine how many times you backup your site. Because if you post every day but only backup your site every month. If your site goes down and can’t be recovered at the end of the month. Then you have to go back to an old backup to restore. Then you’re going to miss that whole month’s content which would be a big pain.
So depending on how often you make updates to your site, that’ll determine how often you want to schedule backups.
One of the great features of this plugin that you don’t see a lot of free ones is you can back up to any one of the below services.
- UpdraftPlus Vault
- Dropbox
- Amazon S3
- Rackspace Cloud Files
- Google Drive
- Microsoft OneDrive
- FTP
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud
- Backblaze
- WebDAV
- S3-Compatible(Generic)
- OpenStack (Swift)
- DreamObjects
If you want to backup more than one of them, you’ve to get a premium add-on. But one should be enough. If you don’t choose these options, the backups will be stored right on your server. That’s usually not a good idea. If a malware script gets onto the server, it can also infect backup files inside a server.
In the backups, you can choose to include your plugins, themes, and uploads and exclude specific subfolders.
Check the email check box if you want a basic report sent when your backups are made.
And then you can click show expert settings which I’m not going to go over.
Most people need just a general scheduled backup. All you need is the non-expert settings. So don’t overcomplicate things. Just keep it simple and then Save Changes at the bottom.
After you’ve picked all the options that you want and then we can go back to our current status and click on backup now.
It’s asking if I want to include the database and the files. And click Backup Now. And it will backup your site to the given place before.
If we go over to the Existing Backups section, you can see the available backups. Also, we can restore this backup. We can also view the log, which shows that all the backup went through when it was backed up.
Conclusion
Now you know how to backup your WordPress website using updraft plus. Also, you can get the full version and get premium features from Updraftplus. If you have any questions, please comment below.
