How To Backup WordPress to Dropbox or Google Drive For Free

how to backup wordpress

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Backup is one of the most important activities that you can do in order to be sure that when the disaster strikes you have a good copy of your WordPress site to restore.

There are a lot of hacking and vulnerabilities that are going around WordPress and backing it up for free is of high importance. In this article and video below I will show you how you can backup WordPress for free on Dropbox or Google Drive with the WPVivid backup plugin. This is a new plugin that can additionally help you migrate a website easily. In case you want to see the best free backup plugins for WordPress you can check: Best Free WordPress Backup Plugins.

In case you may have a WooCommerce store than having a good backup is very important to not lose the hard work that you may have putten into building your store with custom plugins like subscriptions, wishlists and other product customizations like recently viewed products, bought together and maybe email customization. With the help of this plugin, you can automatically backup your WooCommerce store and keep your customizations and most important your customer orders.

In this article, we will schedule a weekly automatic backup of WordPress to Dropbox or Google Drive to have a secure copy with the WPVivid backup plugin.

WordPress Backup Best Practices

In this section, we will speak a little about what are the best practices when you want to backup your WordPress site.

1. Storing your backups on the same server as the website

You don’t want to only have local copies of your WordPress website, in case someone hacks your account you can lose everything. That’s why good practice is to backup your WordPress site in remote locations that are not linked with the main account. For this reason, Dropbox or Google Drive are good options.

2. Backup Frequency

You would want the backup frequency to cover the scenario wherein the case of restore loses as little data as possible. If you have a website where you publish a couple of posts a day you would want to back up the site each day or at least 3 times a week. If you are publishing only 2-3 articles a week you are OK with the weekly schedule. In the function of your posting frequency, you think about the backup strategy for your website.

3. Don’t rely on the hosting backup only

Most of the hosting providers are offering backups in their plan, this is, for instance, the case of SiteGround. Even so, it is a good practice to have your own backup. Think what will happen if for some reason the backup is not done by mistake by the hosting provider or it takes a lot of time to have it restored. Also, there are cases when the accounts are locked by the hosting provider and for this reason, is important to have your own backup to not depend on them.

4. Backup testing

To be sure that you are able to use the backup for restore the best thing will be to test it. You can take a full backup done by the plugin and restore it on a subdomain and see if it has everything you need. It has no point to take backups if they are not usable.

5. Check Backup Logs

From time to time is good to check the backup logs and make sure there isn’t any error that is preventing the backup from being done. The backup is done automatically and you may forget that is even there, that’s why is important to see that is running and is not having issues.

6. Backup Retention Period

Having one copy of the backup is not enough, think that someone is hacking your site and you find out in a couple of weeks. You will need to restore a clean copy before hacking was there and after importing the latest articles. Having multiple backup copies that are covering a couple of weeks is the best when it comes to the backup retention period. You can have daily backups for sites with a lot of new articles and weekly backups that are stored for a longer period.

How To Backup WordPress to Dropbox or Google Drive For Free

In the next steps, we will see how you can configure the automatic WordPress backup to Google Drive once a week and have there a good copy of your website. For backup, we will use WPvivid backup plugin.

Step 1: Install the plugin

If it wasn’t obvious already first we will need to have the plugin installed to be able to backup our site. To install the plugin you need to go to Plugins – Add New and search for WPVivid and Install and activate it:

Step 2: Configure Backup Storage

Next, you need to go and configure the remote storage where the backup will be done. You need to go to the WPVivid backup tab and then to remote storage and Google Drive or Dropbox and enter the alias and then authenticate. You just need to allow access to your Drive and at the end, you will have the storage configured.

Step 3: Enable Auto Backup

Now you just need to enable the auto backups. To do this you go into the Schedule tab and:

  • Check Enable backup schedule
  • Choose Weekly
  • Choose Database + Files (Entire website)
  • Choose: Send backups to remote storage (choose this option, the local backup will be deleted after uploading to remote storage completely)

It should be as in below:

Now in the Beckup&Restore window, you should see the backup schedule:

Step 4: Configure the backup file size and how many to be retained

Next, you need to choose the backup file size and how many backups are to be retained. In the function of the hosting provider, you need to put the file size of the backup files. Some of the hosting providers are limiting the file size to 500MB and so on I have chosen this value.

Next, you should choose how many backups to keep I have chosen 5 as are enough.

Step 5: Do a manual Backup first time

If you don’t have a backup of the site you can create a manual backup to have one. You just check Send Backups to remote storage and hit backup now in the main settings page and backup should start:

After manual backup finishes, you can Check google Drive and you should have a file there as below:

What’s next

Now you need to sit back and relax when it comes the time for the automatic backup to run just check the logs and see if everything went OK. You should restore the backup on a subdomain just to be sure it is having everything.

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