Top 5 Best Backup and Restore plugins for WordPress

Posted on May 1st, 2021

Creating regular backups of a website is one of the mandatory things you can do on your website. Backups indicate that your data is secured, and you can quickly get back the data in case some exception. Certain things can happen to your website without your issue, which is indeed a reason for crashes. It can be a Code Error, Virus Attacks, Hackers, Extension Error, Domain Error, Hosting Error, Traffic Error, etc.

These issues will accidentally come and affect the whole website. After that, it’s mostly impossible to get back the website data. But if we already have a backup of the website, we will also have a peaceful mind after the crash. You can quickly restore the website from the most recent backup.

Let’s understand the types of issues from which backups can save you, if you have one!

Reasons why Backups are Necessary

There are plenty of reasons why having automatic backups and a backup system in place. In this section, I will show you 7 reasons why you should have backups for your website.

1. Undo Changes during Updates

Regular updates are necessary for our website, and It always keeps the business functioning smoothly. But sometimes, the updates conflict while updating the website. Sometimes the installation will go unexpectedly wrong and damage the website beyond repair. In this case, If you have a most recent backup, you can quickly restore the site without losing anything!

Also, If you have Automatic backups enabled, You don’t even have to worry about creating a backup before the update. You can simply update your site after the regular Automatic backups are created for your site.

2. Secure the Website’s data

Unavoidable accidents can affect our website more than our imagination. For instance, you have a trending blog. On that blog, you have thousands of posts and hundreds of subscriber’s information. The blog accidentally got a virus attack, and all the posts and affiliate marketing links are infected.

Now think about the same blog with regular backups available. You just have to restore the the latest backup and the website will be up and running again.

3. Handle the Exceptions after new Installation

WordPress is one of the most famous Content Management Systems(CMS) which allows us to extend the website features. You can easily install a plugin from the WordPress plugin repository to add more features to your site. Keep in mind, Not all the plugins are safe to install. Some might contain the error or some might conflict, both the reasons can take your site down.

These plugins will also get regular updates. Which also include many other features and enhanced speed of the plugins services. At the same time, this plugin could affect your website in the wrong way too. Here, your backups will help you every time when new installations involve unexpected changes on the website.

4. Improve the security against Hackers

Security against cyberattack by hackers is also a basic requirement of any website. The hacker can try to change the administrative permissions of any account as well as steat the important information from our database.

They will try to lock your account, and then you can’t log in with your account information. They can also deform the website with different types of actions like Deleting the posts and pages, as well as installing malicious plugins on the website that can benefit them in the future.

5. Keep the migration process simple

At some point, you may want to migrate from one web hosting account to another. This migration process will require you to create a backup of your whole site. In simple words, In the migration process, you just have to create a backup of your whole site; Files and Database. Then, you have to import both of them on the new server.

If you have a solution to create a backup of your site whenever you want, you can quickly create a backup and upload it on the another server. WordPress plugins allow us to do the same thing.

6. Guard Againt Human Mistakes

While we work with many files and data, It commonly happens that somehow we delete the Important files by mistake. This will affect the website’s functionality. But there are some ways to resolve this problem too.

You can restore the latest backup of the website. With the help of this, you can get your deleted files back. You can deal with all the Human errors if you just have automatic backups enabled!

7. Create a testing version of the website

For instance, you have a website that has a good rank and visitors. It requires many efforts to convert the visitors to regular clients, and it’s mandatory to update with the latest features on the website.

But we need to test the latest features first before we can give access to the clients. You can create a backup of the required data and use it to test the latest versions of the site on the test domain.

So, these are the 7 reasons why you need regular backups for your site. Backups will save you in many unexpected cases. If you are using WordPress, You can use one of the many WordPress backup and restore plugins to keep your site safe in any case. You can also export the backups off-site on the desired cloud storage services.

Here are the 5 best WordPress backup and restore plugins we have selected for you.

  1. BackupBuddy
  2. BlogVault
  3. UpdraftPlus
  4. BoldGrid Backup
  5. BackWPup

Let’s get started with the first and the most popular backup and restore plugin for WordPress.

1. BackupBuddy

Backup Buddy WordPress Backup and Restore plugin

The BackupBUddy plugin is one of the most used plugins on the WordPress platform. The reason behind the popularity is the ease of use and the feature list of this plugin. Where other plugins allow you to create a backup of some parts, The Backup buddy will enable you to create backups of every file. This plugin allows us to include almost everything in the backup. In short, this plugin will enable you to create a copy of your entire WordPress. After the backup is ready, it will store the export file in a downloadable ZIP format or on the cloud storage services. Let’s understand the feature list of BackupBuddy in brief.

1. Entire WordPress Backup

The Backup Buddy is designed to create a backup of the entire WordPress, including several sections of the site. You can create a backup of the WordPress Database, Server’s Directory, All plugins/themes, and All the non-WordPress files files included.

2. Automatic or Scheduled Backups

We can’t practically create a backup of the site at the same time daily in every few hours. So, Any WordPress backup plugin must support the Automatic Backup or scheduled backup. If it is not, you have to create a manual backup before making any ready. So, The auto-backup feature is mandatory for all WordPress backup plugins. Backup Buddy already supports the Scheduled Backup in different ways.

  • Multiple Types of Backups: Not only the full site backup, you can also create a backup of a specific part of the site.
  • Backup schedule and Start time: You can set a specific date and time to start your backup plan. Then, you can also schedule backups on hourly, daily, weekly, monthly basis. Or, you can also set the custom schedule.
  • Scheduling does not rely on WordPress Cron: The scheduled backup also depends on the website traffic. If there are almost no changes to the site’s data, the backup process will not continue for the day or specific period.

3. Off-site Backup storage locations

Everyone wants a plugin that fulfills all the needs, and even I don’t wish to use different plugins for different features. With the help of BackupBuddy plugin, you can directly transfer the backup(zip) file to your online cloud storage accounts. You can add different locations like Amazon web services, Google Drive, Dropbox, BackupBuddy Stash, Rackspace Cloud, Remote servers (SFTP/FTP) and E-mail.

This plugin will even help you use these attached storage locations directly from your plugin dashboard. So we can instantly restore the Backup file from storage locations. But why is this feature so important? Besause if you are storing the backups on the same server and you somehow lose access to the server, you will lose your site as well as backups. So, It’s important to keep the backups out of the server or off-site.

4. Customized Backup Facility

For instance, Imagine you have a huge website with most of the storage used for media files. Now, If you will include the media files in your regular website backups, the cumulative storage required to store backups will be huge! With the help of this feature, you can simply exclude the media files in frequent backups.

Then, you can also create a customized backup plan for the media files seperately with low frequency to save the storage space on the cloud storage and also save the money.

5. Server Tools

Backup buddy plugin offers many pre-design tools which will help your website work smoothly. Here, see the below list of tools available in this plugin.

  • Malware scan: The Malware Scan is one of the best features available in this plugin. Malware scan will help you scan the site for Malware to make sure backups are not infected. So, you can have a healthy backup file without any virus or malware.
  • Database Scan and Repair: Another facility of this plugin is database scan which will help you scan the database just before creating a backup. It is possible that the database has some errors and is un-optimized, and if you’re going to create a backup of the database, then the errors will also appear on the backup. In this situation, you should scan the database first and solve the mistakes to create a backup file of a healthy database.
  • Monitor Storage & Resource Usage: You can monitor the storage location and the storage that is being used on the server.

So, That’s the longest description of the most popular WordPress backup and restore plugin. It provides almost everything you will ever require to manage backups of your WordPress site. It is a complete package with all the required tools to store and manage good amount of backups, if required.

2. Blog Vault

Blog Vault WordPress Backup and Restore plugin

Blot vault is another backup plugin that also can be a good plugin for our website. One of the best plugins, Blog Vault already provides its management to more than 400k websites. Also, with the 100% of restore rate without any error. You can directly store your backup files on the cloud storage location. Also, it provides an inbuilt free staging facility with bulk site updates.

Blog Vault is All-in-one Solution for a backup system. We can set up Scheduled backups and automated backups. The main benefit of this plugin is Incremental backup, which means the Second time a backup is created, it will only sync the changes in files. We will discuss this in the later in the same section. Let’s see the features in brief.

1. Incremental Backups

Incremental backups is one of the hottest tech on the internet. It can significantly reduce the cost of the storage server. Let me explain you the concept with an example. The first time it will take the backup of your site, It can be 1000MB. So, the size of the first backup would be 1000MB without compression. Then, you will upload some files and now the size of your site is 1010MB. The second time when it will create a backup of your site, The size of the second backup would be 10MB only. In short, the second, third, fourth and all other backups will contain only the changes made between a specific period.

For this feature, BlogVault can just beat all the other backup plugins. You can also store these backups on your desired Storage server or a cloud service.

2. Scheduled/Automated Backups

Scheduling is very common among all the backup plugins. It will allow you to create a schedule for automatic backups. You can also create manual backups as many as you want, for sure!

3. Restore Ratio

With Blog Vault, you can experience up to 50% faster restore speed than any plugin in the market. Also, it has a maximum restore success ratio than other plugins. This plugin offers you 100% successful restoration with differential/incremental restoration. This feature makes this plugin different and reliable.

We can store 90 days backup on the archive on basic plans, also 365 days backup on higher plans. So, you can restore the backup and recover the site from any backup without any issue. Now, the best thing is you can restore the backup even if you’re not connected to the internet or offline website.

4. Free Staging Integrated

This plugin also provides a staging facility built-in. With the help of this feature, we can test our website quickly. Also, migration of the website to another host will be easy with Blog Vault.

5. Easy Migrations

Blog Vault can migrate the website 80% faster and easier. It is compatible with more than 5000 web hosting sites. You can migrate your website in just one click, and Blog vault will automatically configure the settings according to your last web host settings. It also offers zero downtime for the migration with a guarantee. It will rewrite all the Website page URLs automatically. With the help of Blog Vault, you can migrate to a new Domain, Hosting Account, DNS or Server too.

6. Multiple Site Support

Blog Vault is the first plugin that provides Multiple Sites support. You can create Backups, Staging environments, and migrations for multiple sites from a single plan. Even you can invite your team members for more support with a Blog vault. You can save up to 12 hours in a week with the help of the Blog vault dashboard. It has beautiful and comprehensive Client Reporting tools.

7. Woo-Commerce Backup:

Woo-Commerce websites almost require a couple of backups daily. It automatically creates a backup of all the orders as soon as the order registers in the database. You can even recover all the site data with 365 days of backup, and the plugin will automatically save this backup in the archive. Complete data protection with 24*7 with off-site backup storage means we can keep the backup files to any other storage services like Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox, etc.

3. Updraft Plus

Updraft plus - WordPress backup and restore plugin

UpdraftPlus is a plugin that offers you a complete backup system for your growing WordPress site. It also provides you many features like scheduled backup, Storage options, and other required features. UpdraftPlus plugin is one of the highest-rated plugins on the internet for WordPress sites. You can create full site backup as well as Customized backup too. And, UpdraftPlus is designed to run everywhere where WordPress exists. It also supports multisite from one roof.

UpdraftPlus plugin is so powerful that it can create a backup up to 100 GB without any data loss. UpdraftPlus is also used to create a backup of the non-WordPress files and external databases. This plugin will prove more beneficial for Woo-commerce clients because it provides incremental backups. Backups can be scheduled on an hourly configuration too. Let’s see UpdraftPlus’s complete feature list in brief.

1. Scheduling

UpdraftPlus supports scheduled/automated and manual backups. You can set the planned backup on every 4,8,12 hours, Daily, Weekly, Fortnightly, or monthly. Also, It can be customizable at a specific time. Customizable means we can set a different schedule for different backups like Files, Media files, databases, etc. After a successful backup, it also provides reports about the backup. We can say it is an intelligent plugin because it automatically creates a backup before Plugins, Themes, and WordPress updates.

2. Storage Options

UpdraftPlus provides more storage options than any other plugin. It supports cloud storage with Amazon S3; It can also test the Amazon S3 settings and diagnose common problems. Just like Amazon S3, it also supports Rackspace cloud storage. You can also use other cloud storage like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and Azure Blob Storage, Dropbox, WebDAV, FTP server, etc. In different storage locations, it can save the backup files to multiple destinations in a single click. You can also create scheduled backup at predefined time intervals. You can send the backups separately in email too.

3. Security

With UpdraftPlus, we can encrypt the backup file for security reasons. Then we can transport the encrypted backup file to the cloud storage. We recommend this plugin for confidential data backup.

4. Reporting and Monitoring

All the backups operations will be thoroughly logged. It will display the status of the backup in progress too. You can see all the information on the WordPress dashboard, and it will also show you the warnings and errors. It will send the report just after the successful backup. You can see a file or report for the verification of the backup integrity.

5. Restoring and Migrating

UpdraftPlus can create a backup on each WordPress entity like Database, Plugins, Themes, Uploaded Content in separated files. You can do these all from the WordPress control panel. This plugin will even help you to create a backup of any core file of WordPress.

It offers the facility to import the backup file via drag-and-drop or FTP servers. The main benefit of this plugin is that we can import any backup file. We can even restore the backup file created in other plugins like BackupWordPress, BackWPup, etc. So, this plugin is genuinely all one plugin because you can migrate your website in a couple of clicks with the help of this plugin.

4. BoldGrid Backup

BoldGrid Backup - WordPress backup and restore plugin

BoldGrid Backup plugin will be an excellent WordPress backup and restore plugin. It obviously supports both automatic and manual backups. It can also help you restore the site if WordPress is corrupted. It is a fully automatic plugin which will roll back the changes in case update fails. The main benefit of this plugin is we just need one license for many websites. So, from one license, we can manage unlimited websites.

BoldGrid backup is introduced by BoldGrid, which is one of the famous website builders powered by WordPress. Let’s see each feature of this plugin in brief.

1. Easy and Safe, Automated Backups

BoldGrid backup is one of the best powerful tool which ensures that you will always get a clean backup of the website. You need to select the date and time for automated backup or create a backup manually. We can do this all with a single click. So we can say it is an easy-to-use plugin with safety. This plugin checks the Hosting account details and ensures that the hosting account provides the necessary support for our site. And also, it verifies the integrity of the backups so you can get consistent ready-to-use backups.

2. Remote Storage Support

This plugin also offers us to store the backup files on remote locations like Amazon S3 cloud, Google Drive, or FTP servers directly. This feature also works with automatic backup, so your backup file will be directly transfered to your desired cloud storage service.

3. Website Crash Prevention

We recommend this plugin because it offers the toolset to prevent website crashes. Like Site check, you can monitor your site errors which can lead to site crashes. So, you’ll get an E-mail in case this plugin detects any errors. You’ll also get options to restore your site with the latest backups. The second security feature of this plugin is Automatic Site Protections. It automatically creates an archive backup before any theme and plugin updates, so if the updates fail, this plugin will automatically restore the last backup.

4. Easy Migration and Fix Crashes

This plugin is excellent with site migrations. In case you want to migrate your website from one hosting account to another. Just create a backup of the first site in the archive and restore the backup on the new WordPress site. You can use the Magic Link to automate the migration process. You can also use the restoration command-line script to restore the backup in case your WordPress is corrupted.

5. File Browser

Another premium feature of the BoldGrid backup plugin is the File Browser. This feature will help you to see the backup files with the file browser. So, you can restore some specific files from the backups. We can even search for the particular file from the archive backups with the help of the File browser.

5. BackWPUp

BackWPUp WordPress backup and restore plugin

The BackWPup is truly a backup plugin that is the available free and premium version too. It creates a complete WordPress website backup and stores it to remote locations like Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace, etc. You can also transfer the backup file to an FTP server or By email. This plugin is famous for its simplicity and ease to use, and it allows you to create a scheduled backup. 

This plugin is already in use by 600,000 websites. It is one of the best alternative plugins for backup facilities. It also comes with a Premium version which provides extra features like store ability to Google Drive. Let’s see the feature list of the BackWPup and understand the features in brief.

1. Complete Database and WordPress Backup

With the help of this plugin, we can create a complete WordPress backup with the database too. It even allows you to create scheduled and manual backups for your WordPress site. You can either create a whole website backup, customized backup, or full database backup.

2. Complete Automatic Restore

This plugin supports auto restore in case WordPress fails to update the Themes and Plugin. BackWPup will also save the backups in the archive with encryption. And also, it will restore the encrypted backup, Because encryption is necessary for security reasons.

3. Reports and 3rd party Storage

After any successful Backup and Restore, the BackWPup plugin will automatically send an E-mail with log reports. So, you can notice the issues and errors that occur during the process. After the successful backup we can store the backup file on any cloud storage like Google Drive, Microsoft Azure, and Onedrive, Dropbox, FTP, Amazon Glacier, Rackspace, and many more. Only premium plan holders can use many features.

4. Database Check with Multi-site Support

Database check is also a great feature of the BackWPup plugin. With the help of this tool, you can check and optimize your database. So it will work smoothly and without any errors. This plugin also offers Multisite support, which means you can manage more than one site from a single plan.

 

Conclusion: Backups are always important. If you are using WordPress to manage your site, These plugins will help you with your backup plan. Almost all of the plugins mentioned in this list are free. If some plugin is not free, we have mentioned it in the list. So, Now you know which plugin is best for your requirements. All the plugins are popular because of some awesome feature each one provides. We hope this list helped you select a plugin for your site. If you have questions, please let us know in the following comment section. We are happy to help!

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