In my review i’ll try to cover all the main points of why you should backup your website, why regular Backups are crucial for any website or blog, and why i have chosen backup buddy plugin for my websites over all other backup alternatives.

What is Backup buddy Plugin?

Backup buddy is one of the most popular wordpress plugins that allows you to easily backup, migrate and restore your wordpress site. Backup buddy has many great features like: local Backup, Remote destinations Backups, Scheduled backups, Restore backups, Email notifications and more.

Backup buddy allows you to backup all your wordpress site files easily with few clicks, you can choose whether to do database backups of full website backups. You can manually create backups at anytime you want and also you can schedule backups to take place hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. Not only that but you can set the backups to be automatically stored or sent to any remote destination like: Amazon S3, Drop box, local directory, Rackspace, FTP or even to your email inbox.

Storing backups on remote destinations away from your website local server is a great way to secure your content, you should never rely on your local host only to store your backups, there are many plugins that create local backups and i’ll explain why you shouldn’t do that in a moment. First let’s discuss why you should backup your website.

Why Backup Your Website?

Well, I’ll explain briefly my story when i first launched my first wordpress site at 2010, it was a simple wordpress site with around 10 blog posts, but i have put alot of time and effort to create that site. I woke up one day and my website was gone, my homepage was redirected to show an ugly message saying ” This website was hacked”, then i start receiving notifications emails from i found many my hosting company with some malicious pages urls that have been injected into my website folders. It was like a nightmare.

In attempt to solve that, by deleting all the malicious urls detected by my hosting, i also changed my user and password. After messing with some files here and there, i was able to make my website display as normal. However, that didn’t solve the main problem, and later my website was hacked for the 2nd time, at that time i was really mad and didn’t know what to do. My hosting didn’t have the solution either, normally what they do is they provide you with some tips and advice to secure your website, but they won’t be able to detect where are the security holes or damaged files in your account. So I’ve solved this on my own and again i took long time trying to remove all the suspected files on my site and changing my login details. That time i’ve made a backup of my site (I wish i could have done that earlier).

But it didn’t take long before my website got hacked for the 3rd time and I was about to giveup on my blog.

I realized earlier, that even if i have restored my website using the backup i’ve created, my website will be still vulnerable for hacking attempts. Why? Because that backup was created after my website has been hacked so it was already too late. That backup had those security holes and malicious codes included, so whenever i’d try to restore my website, it would have been hacked over and over again. Can you see how much headache this can be?!

To cut the story short, the only way i’ve found around that was to start my website from scratch. For a small blog like mine at that time, it wasn’t a big issue but imagine if this happened for a blog with over +500 or 10,000 posts and years worth of content. It won’t be cool right?

I don’t want to scare you, as not all wordpress sites are getting hacked, infact wordpress is a strong platform, it’s used by millions of bloggers and it’s getting even better. But we all do mistakes, and any small change you do to your website content (adding a free plugin or theme) might make your website vulnerable and increase the risk of it being attacked in the future, so why not be prepared!

Now, you understand what i mean, and why backing up your website is crucial for keeping your website content safe.

Why Remote Backups are better than local Backups?

This is another question you should keep in mind, there are many free plugins that store backups in a local folder/directory inside your wordpress content folder, this isn’t bad but incase if your website got messed up, hacked or if you want to migrate to another host, It will be more convenient to store your backups on a remote destination to keep them safe, that is just another reason why i like to use Backup buddy.

Backup buddy Features:

Once you’ve installed Backup buddy on your wordpress site as normal, you will need to activate your license inorder to receive automatic updates and support for the plugin. And you will be ready to create your first backup.

Creating a Backup:

Remote Destinations:

Backup buddy supports many remote destinations such as: Amazon S3, Dropbox, email, FTP, local directory and Rackspace which you may transfer backups to. You may manually send backups to these locations or automatically have them sent for scheduled backups. In addition to viewing files, you may copy remote backups to your server, and delete files. As a backup buddy customer, you will also get 1 GB free storage to our own BackupBuddy Stash cloud destination.

Include or Exclude Files

Backup buddy allows you to choose only the files and directories you want to backup and exclude any others files.

Scheduled Backups

You can easily schedule backups to be created automatically for your website each day, week, month ..etc. and have those backups been sent automatically to any of the remote or local destination mentioned above.

Malware Scan

Another extra feature of backup buddy is you can scan all your website for malware, and display the results along with some other info like: your website sever details, links, java script and blacklisting on search engines.

Auto Updates and Support

With your Purchase of backup buddy, you get unlimited free plugin updates, support + One year of ithemes forum support.

Backup buddy Plugin Vs. Free Backup Plugins

Buckup buddy is a premium plugin, while there are many free wordpress plugins that can backup your website, so why use Backup buddy? Well, I’ve tried many free backup plugins like: XCloner, BackWPUp, wp-db-backup duplicator ..etc. I always had some concerns about these plugins.

Here’s exactly why i’ve switched to Backup buddy:

I’ve tested the scheduled backups feature in some free plugins, it has worked for sometime then it has stopped and i started to receive error notifications for uncompleted backups. I attempted to reschedule backups but that didn’t fix the issue.

Not all free backup plugins allow you to send backups to remote destinations, some will do but usually you will experience the problem explained in point 1. (not reliable)

Free backup plugins usually lack good support and updates, they may work for sometime but they aren’t reliable for the long term. Although the plugins are free but some will require you to pay for support.

With Backup buddy you get all what you need to easily backup, store and migrate your website, and you get unlimited free plugin updates, support and One year of ithemes forum support. And for the one time payment of $60 i think it’s worth it.

Backup buddy 25% Discount

Backup buddy regular price is: $80 for 2 sites, $100 for 10 sites or $150 for unlimited sites. But you can get 25% discount. Click here and enter the coupon code: ITPAL25

Conclusion:

As i explained in this review, Backing up your website is crucial if you really care about your blog and you don’t want to lose all your hard work overnight. There are many ways to backup your website, if you have a wordpress site then the easiest way is to use a wordpress plugin that can automate the process of creating and storing backups for you, whether you choose a free or a premium plugin like Backup buddy, the main point here is to go and backup your website now. I recommend backup buddy because i always like to keep things easy and it has all what i need. Click here to get backup buddy.

Backup buddy Wordpress Plugin Full Review + Discount

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