BackupGuard Pro

You notice the damage weeks later and the good backup has rotated out

A form stopped sending orders, or someone deleted a page nobody visits. You find out late, go calmly to your backups and discover that all of them come after the problem. The backups ran every night and faithfully saved the site already broken.

A backup protects you to the extent that it reaches further back than the time you take to notice a fault. That is why, in this type of plugin, retention deserves as much attention as frequency. Daily backups give little margin if you only keep the latest ones.

BackupGuard Pro is now called JetBackup for WordPress, and that is the name you will see in the dashboard.

Schedule, content and destination of each backup

• Backups of files, the database or both, choosing the folders and databases that go in.
• Multiple schedules: by hour, day, week, month or year, several on the same site. Files and database can run at different frequencies.
• Retention limit so the destination does not fill up, plus email notifications.
• Remote destinations in the Premium edition: Amazon S3 and compatible services, FTP, SFTP, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box and pCloud, with the option of your own S3 destination.
• Process control: live progress, cancellation and a log of each backup or restore.
• Multisite, with selective subsite restore.

How to work out how far back you can go

Retention counts backups, not days. When the set number is reached, each new backup pushes out the oldest one. Your real reach is therefore the frequency multiplied by the number of backups you keep.

The way out is to combine schedules. The plugin starts with daily, weekly and monthly schedules, and each one carries its own retention. Daily ones cover yesterday's mistake, and monthly ones let you return to a point before the fault you took a while to see. Adjust the numbers to how fast your content changes and the space at your destination.

Moving a site with the same tool

Restoring also serves for migrating. You can download a backup, upload it on another host and restore it, even on a different domain. The plugin also includes a migration wizard between hosts.

If the destination uses cPanel or DirectAdmin, backups can be exported to those panels by choosing the matching structure. Instead of a full restore, you can also exclude paths and select tables to recover only a part.

Backups do not watch your site. It checks the integrity of WordPress core files daily, but its features include no malware scanning, so a silent fault in your content gets backed up like everything else. Restoring returns the site to an earlier moment, with the good and the bad it held then.

Getting started with a destination outside your host

It runs on PHP with zlib and cURL. A Linux server is recommended: Windows is supported, with possible limitations. For external backups you need an account with the destination service. This order is a working suggestion and is worth adjusting to your site:

1. Connect a remote destination outside your host.
2. Review which folders and tables go in, and exclude what you do not need.
3. Assign retention to the daily, weekly and monthly schedules.
4. Turn on email notifications.
5. Restore a backup on a test site to check the process from start to finish.

UpdraftPlus and BackupBuddy for comparison

UpdraftPlus offers incremental backups and an automatic backup before updating. It is of interest if your site is large or you update often. BackupBuddy works from the WordPress dashboard and restores with a standalone file, importbuddy.php, placed on the server next to the backup.

Decisions about backups and restores

How often should I back up?

It depends on how much the content changes. Dynamic sites call for daily backups, and weekly ones may be enough for a static site.

Can I restore only a part?

Yes. During a restore you can choose tables and exclude paths, with a wildcard for several folders or files.

Does it work for changing domains?

Yes. It can restore on another domain and move the site between hosts.