Why I Use BackupBuddy for WordPress Backups
I first used BackupBuddy about 4 years ago. At the time I was using it as a migration tool because it had excellent built-in search and replace tools. Over the years I’ve kept my eye on the plugin and watched it grow from a rudimentary backup plugin to an extremely powerful tool that integrates with a variety of other plugins.
I’ve actually been using BackWPup on my own site for some months now, and it got me thinking that I should review other options, so I recently did tutorial series on both BackWPup and BackupBuddy.
BackWPup has been working fine for me, but I broke one of my own backup rules; I never tested my backups, doing a restore. During the video series I came to the part where we do a restore, and I discovered that BackWPup has no restore functionality at all.
Now, that’s not a huge problem for me, because I’m comfortable doing manual database restores and copying files back to the server. However, this isn’t very user friendly for your average user.
In the process of reviewing BackupBuddy I realized how much further it has come from I used 4 years ago.
Getting Started with BackupBuddy
Here’s our introduction to BackupBuddy:
Remote Storage
Keeping your backups on a server other than your web site is pretty important. BackupBuddy now lets you make those remote backups, but even better it offers its own remote backup space with a free tier. It’s called Stash. It’s super simple to do this now, there’s no reason not to.
Whole Site Restoring
It used to be that you had to upload both a backup file as well as a php file, AND manually delete your database tables to do a whole site restore. Now all you have to do is upload that one php file and it can access your remote storage and recover from there.
Single File Restore
This is huge. As far as I know, no other backup plugin allows for this. Right within the plugin user interface you can open a backup file, browse through the contents, and restore any number of single files or folders. Far more often do I find that I accidentally deleted one file and need to get it back than I find the need to restore my entire site.
Summary
I know I must sound like a fan boy for BackupBuddy. It’s partly true, I’m a huge fan. But the reason I’m a fan is that I think it’s truly the best backup plugin on the market. It’s not free, but I think it’s worth it.
Click here for our complete class on using BackupBuddy.
Ha !
I have just done a restore using BackupBuddy – the ImportBuddy section.
What rubbish !
It has taken 26 hours, yes 26 hours to restore a simple woocommerce site with 5460 products roughly. And then it crashed !!
FATAL PHP ERROR: type => 1
message => Maximum execution time of 120 seconds exceeded
file => C:\Inetpub\vhosts\[url=http://mysite.com]mysite.com[/url]\httpdocs\importbuddy\classes\wp-db.php
line => 1823
So no soft-landing or message to say restart or whatever. No mention of how to continue if that is at all possible. But just a Fatal termination. After 26 hours !
This would be a joke if it wasn’t so serious.
It’s easy to Backup, but obviously when it comes to actually needing to do a Restore – it’s a big Fail to BackupBuddy. Pathetic !!
Hello, thank you for bringing this plugin to the point.
I am interested if it is possible to create a develompment copy with backupbuddy where you can for example update plugins, test new features etc. and after you’re done create a backup of this development site and “upgrade” the live version of the site with this backup.