With so many security issues, hacks and vulnerabilities in today’s WordPress websites the best defense and sure way to protect your website and data is to have a proper automated backups set.
There are many ways to take backups of your website, some webmasters prefer to take backups manually of their web files and databases. But to save time and be more productive there are many automated tools and services that can be combined and used to take backups.
If you are running a WordPress powered website then you are in luck, as there are many plugins available combined with cloud storage web services to take automated backups as often as you would like. There are many plugins available for free on WordPress plugin repository that help you take automated backups on Dropbox, Google Drive and many more cloud storage service.
Dropbox plugin backup plugins
- Drop in Dropbox
- WordPress Backup to Dropbox
- UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration for WordPress
- BackWPup Free – WordPress Backup Plugin
Any plugin listed above will take a complete backup of your WordPress website to a cloud storage web service specified in the plugin.
We will use UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration for WordPress as it supports all the major cloud storage platforms like Dropbox, Amazon S3, Bitcasa, Google Drive and many more.
To use this plugin, first you will need to install it. Easy way to install it is to navigate to Plugins -> Add New in your WP Admin and search for “updraftplus”, then install and activate the plugin.
After the plugin is installed, you will see new options appear under the Settings tab in WP Admin.
Now we need to connect cloud storage services to our WordPress website using the settings available in this plugin. To do this navigate to WP Admin -> Settings -> UpdraftPlus Backups -> Settings, then select an option from “Choose your remote storage” dropdown menu.
Click the link that appears after “Authenticate with Dropbox” to link up with your Dropbox account.
Note: You will need to create and sign in to your Dropbox account in order to complete the process.
After your account is authenticated then hit “Save Changes” under the Settings tab in UpdraftPlus Backups.’
It is recommended that you schedule automated backups rather than manual backups, as this will save time and ensure that you have timely backups available at your convenience. In the settings tab in updraftplus use “Configure Backup Contents And Schedule” to define the time of auto backups and how many copies of backups to retain.
I would recommend setting it at “Every 4 hours” and retain atleast 2 backup copies. Now after everything is set and done just navigate to Current Status tab in UpdraftPlus Backups and hit “Backup Now” button.
You will see a popup window giving you various options, to take complete backup do not select any option and continue by pressing Backup Now option.
The plugin will immediately start to create backup and upload the files to remote storage that we selected in settings tab, in our case it is Dropbox.
You will see files in Dropbox under the Apps -> UpdraftPlus folder that was created by this plugin.
And that pretty much sums it up. Taking backups on Dropbox is easy using plugins. But having more plugins running on your WP site might slow your site down and you will have to invest more time updating and maintaining your WP site.
There are many hosting companies like Cloudways that help you take automated backups on cloud storage servers like Amazon EC2 and DigitalOcean, without eating away much of your server resources like the plugins do. Going with a hosting company that gives you the ability to take timely automated backups for free is among the most popular features that webmaster look at.
Backups can be real life savers and most effective security measure against anything that can go wrong with your website. It is strongly recommended that you have a backup plan always enabled on your website.