Blog / friday roundup
Four backup plugins, compared from the restore side
We compare four WordPress backup plugins the way that matters: not how they back up, but how the restore goes at 2 a.m. when it counts.
Most backup plugin comparisons are written from the backup side: schedules, destinations, checkboxes. We sit on the other end. When a site breaks, we're often the ones on a support ticket at an odd hour while someone tries to get their restore to work. So this Friday's roundup judges four well-known backup plugins by the only test that matters: what the restore is actually like.
A backup you haven't restored is a hope, not a backup. Keep that in mind for all four of these.
UpdraftPlus
The one we see most, and the restore experience is the reason. Restoring is a button inside WordPress: pick the backup, pick what to restore (files, database, plugins, themes), and go. When the site is still limping along enough to reach the admin panel, this is as painless as it gets. The weak spot is the disaster case: if WordPress itself is dead, you need a working install first before UpdraftPlus can pull anything back, which means a manual bootstrap step people don't discover until the bad day.
Duplicator
Built around a different idea: it packages the whole site into an archive plus a standalone installer script. The restore doesn't need WordPress at all. You drop two files on a blank hosting account, run the installer, and the site comes back, database and all. That makes it our favourite for the true worst case and for moving sites between accounts. The trade-off shows up on big sites, where building the package can strain PHP limits on shared hosting; large sites sometimes need the packaging settings tuned before it completes.
BackWPup
A dependable scheduler that pushes backups to external destinations, and we like that discipline: a backup stored only on the same server as the site is not a real backup. The restore side is where it demands more of you. Historically the flow was closer to manual: download the archive, unpack files, import the database yourself. That's fine for people comfortable in cPanel and phpMyAdmin, and a rough afternoon for people who aren't. Know which one you are before the day you find out.
WPvivid
The younger of the four but well established, and it covers both patterns: in-dashboard restores like UpdraftPlus and site packaging for migrations like Duplicator. Restores in our experience are straightforward and its staging-style copies are handy for testing a restore without touching the live site, which we wish more people did. Because it does several jobs, the interface has more surface area, so spend ten minutes learning it before you rely on it.
What we'd actually do
Any of these four beats no plugin, and all four beat a plugin that's installed but never tested. Our honest recommendations:
Pick UpdraftPlus or WPvivid if you want restores you can run yourself from the dashboard. Pick Duplicator if you want a package that can rebuild the site from nothing. Whatever you pick, send the backups somewhere off the server, and do one practice restore to a test area this month, not someday.
And keep the rest of the site boring: most of the restores we assist with started with a compromise through outdated software, which is why we keep banging the drum about updates. A current site plus a tested backup is a combination that almost never has a bad day it can't recover from.
Every hosting plan we run includes our own server-side backups as a safety net, but we still want you running one of these plugins, because two independent backup systems fail a lot less often than one. If you want help testing a restore on your account, open a ticket and we'll walk through it with you.