Make a WordPress backup with BackWPup

Some people are looking to manage a website on a limited budget, so finding decent free WordPress plugins is always good.

One such plugin is BackWPup from MarketPress.

While there is a premium version of the plugin that gives you other features like multisite support, even the free version is pretty fully featured for your WordPress website.

Here is how to make a WordPress backup using the free backup plugin BackWPup.

Backing up WordPress with BackWPup

Much like other free WordPress plugins, you can get BackWPup from the WordPress repository.

Once downloaded from your computer, you can simply install the plugin like most others in WordPress by going to the “Plugins” section of the WordPress dashboard on your website and going to “Add New”. From there, you just click on upload and then find your file in the hard drive of your computer.

The immediate opening page has a big blue button that says “Download database backup”. BOOM.

This is a one click solution to get your websites database backed up. This will not bring over all content, but it will at least bring over the hierarchy and pages of your website and/or business.

Let’s dig further.

Making a Job with BackWPup

BackWPup streamlines the backup process by using “Jobs”. Unlike BackupBuddy, which relies on different tabs to do everything, your entire resource for backup information is stored within the Jobs section.

From the initial Jobs tab in your new Job, you can name the job, tell WordPress what parts of your website to back up and more. You can also choose to select Amazon S3, Dropbox, and more as your sources to back up your website. (You will have to know your access information for those tools to have backups go to those sources)

Schedule a backup on BackWPup

The next tab “Schedule” allows you to schedule the time and frequency of backups to the designated source.

To enable the schedule, you have to go to the “Schedule” tab and enable “with WordPress Cron” to get the schedule to show up. This is because the plugin has to tap into the WordPress core cron jobs to get access to the scheduling of backups.

You can schedule a specific time to run a WordPress backup on the website when people are not using it for example.

Make sure to save your changes!!

Choose which database tables to backup on BackWPup

In the same job section, you can click on the tab for DB Backup to include or exclude every available external database table that would be part of another plugin. If you are a business using learning or eCommerce software, this section is perfect for you!

On the next tab titled “Files”, you can choose which plugins, themes, and other major pieces of a WordPress install you want to include or exclude. Since your backup probably relies on keeping the website pretty similar to how it started, you may want to keep this at the default and not exclude major elements of the website.

Migrating is not a capability of BackWPup

Unlike the integration of BackupBuddy with ImportBuddy, BackWPup does not have a built in feature to migrate content over. It is still possible to restore and migrate manually by using WordPress or other plugins (otherwise the plugin would be useless) but it is interesting that it does not exist as a feature out of the box.

That being said, BackupBuddy is a premium plugin for $80 so you expect to get more out of the premium plugin.

Watch a Video

We have a video of backing up the plugin in action as well that you can use to follow along visually.

Have any questions? Comment below!

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