6 Premium WordPress Backup Plugins That Will Save Your Sanity

One of the biggest horrors for WordPress bloggers and site owners is the prospect of losing all your site data and not being able to find a backup. This can happen if you install a new incompatible theme or plugin or if your WordPress site gets hacked. That’s were WordPress Backup Plugins come in handy.

If you’ve been blogging or have a large site to maintain, this can mean losing all your business overnight. If you have a WordPress site that is updated often, scheduling an automatic backup of your data is the best way to ensure that you can restore the latest version of your site.

And what if you’re not a technical person and cannot understand how to manually backup a WordPress site and database? There’s no need to panic if you have taken appropriate precautions and installed any of these WordPress backup plugins below.

These premium WordPress backup plugins will help you create a WordPress backup automatically so that you can restore it any time it goes down. Should you want to do a WordPress backup and migrate to a new server, some of these plugins will allow you to copy, move, clone, backup and restore any WordPress site from its backups.

Note: We haven’t featured any free WordPress backup plugins here, because the paid ones usually have the best features and are supported and updated regularly.

List of Premium WordPress Backup Plugins

1. BackWPup

Developed by MarketPress, the BackWPup Free plugin can schedule automatic backups for your WordPress installation. You decide which content will be stored where and when.

It can be used to create routine and automatic backups via mail, FTP, and in the cloud. You can save your complete installation and push your files to an external Backup Service, like Dropbox, S3, FTP. With a single backup .zip file you can easily restore an installation.

However, the developers state that the free plugin will not be supported as well as the BackWPup Pro version. The Pro version also comes with backup to Amazon Glacier, Google Drive, differential backup of changed directories to Google Drive, S3, Dropbox, Rackspace Cloud Files and MS Azure. You also get premium support and updates.

Prices start at $75 for a single domain.

2. VaultPress

If you want a plugin that provides both, backups and security, for your WordPress site, VaultPress is for you. It provides both daily and realtime syncing of all your WordPress content. It also performs security scans daily and makes it easy to review and fix threats.

You can monitor backup activity in realtime as VaultPress syncs your latest changes. Provide FTP or SSH information, and VaultPress can automatically restore a backup to your site. You can protect all your WordPress.org-Powered sites from the VaultPress dashboard, managing your backups and security in one place.

Prices start at $99 a year.

3. BackupBreeze – Backup WordPress plugin

BackupBreeze is a one-click WordPress backup and restore plugin. To use the automatic WordPress backup feature, you only need to set the frequency at which you would like to take a backup. You can schedule daily, weekly or monthly auto-backups.

You can restore your entire WordPress site using the generated backup file, even if you don’t have the BackupBreeze plugin. Hence your backups are not dependent on the plugin. You can backup your site to Dropbox and Amazon too.

Comes with a membership to WPeka Club at $97.

4. UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration

UpdraftPlus has the highest rating of any WordPress backup plugin at wordpress.org, is installed on over 500,000 sites, and is one of the top-50 most-installed WordPress plugins.

It allows you to implement a WordPress backup export to Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Rackspace Cloud, Copy.Com, OpenStack, FTP, SFTP, or WebDAV account. You also have the option send your WordPress backup to email or keep it on your WordPress server.

Prices start at $70 for two sites.

5. Backup Buddy

One of the first backup plugins to be developed, Backup Buddy lets you run database backups for quick, small, frequent backups or run complete backups to get all your images, themes, plugins and everything else to a safe place.

You can send your backups to their custom backup storage location, BackupBuddy Stash, or to cloud storage like Amazon S3, Dropbox, Rackspace Cloud, or even FTP or email.

If you schedule your backups for WordPress, Backup Buddy will automate your backup, depending on when you require it and send it to your preferred storage location.

Prices start at $80 a year for two sites.

6. BlogVault Real-time Backup

You can do a daily automatic WordPress backup of your entire site with this plugin. It does a complete backup of WordPress database and files.

The Pro version allows you to do a test restore, and revert back to a previous version of your site in case you messed it up. All you have to do is load the chosen backup version to their test servers and you can see it working like a real website.

The Auto-Restore feature automatically restores the backup to the server in your hour of need, without a need for manual intervention.

Prices start at $89 a year for one site.

WordPress Backup Best Practices

• If your WordPress site crashes or goes down, you don’t want your backup stored on the same server. Ideally, you should have a backup stored in three places – your hard drive, your cloud server and a DVD. Backup manually on occasion as a fail safe.

• Adjust your backup frequency depending on how often you update your site. If you update it daily, you should take daily backups, if not, weekly or monthly backups might be preferable. Choose which plugins add value to your site and only back those up.

Now that you have so many excellent WordPress backup options, there’s no excuse not to choose and implement one of them for your WordPress site.

If you want to share your own experience with these plugins, please leave a comment below.