I’ve been looking for years for a good backup solution for WordPress. I finally found it: BackupBuddy.I wanted a “set it and forget it” solution. I was looking for a solution where I could back up manually, locally, automatically, and easily. I needed a solution that wasn’t going to crash shared hosting servers or “time out” while the poor server churns along eventually slowing to a crawl. Oh, sorry other sites on the server, we’ll be back up and running in a minute, let me just kill the process. Been there? Yeah, me too.

Folder Selection

My longtime favorite was WP DB Backup which still does an excellent job although if the database gets too big, it won’t email it. BackupBuddy can back up just the database and FTP it somewhere else on a scheduled basis. But I wanted the theme and upload folders, too. There was another file backup that my hosts didn’t like because they said it was too much of a load on the servers. It was nice because it only did the folders that I wanted. However, BackupBuddy lets your specify which folders you want to back up (e.g. I don’t want to back up wp-admin).

Widget Backup

Another huge feature is widget backup. Before a big WP upgrade, I’d often go into the plugins and literally cut and paste the code out of them to back them up. BackupBuddy backs up your widgets. That’s already worth the price of admission.

Various Backup Locations

With BackupBuddy, you can choose to back up to the local server drive, to another server via FTP, to Amazon S3, or Rackspace Cloud. You can choose to delete the backups when there are new ones, select to keep a certain number of backups, or just keep them all. I’ve notice that sites hosted on GoDaddy won’t let me send the backup to an FTP location so for those I’m using the Amazon S3 storage.

Fine Tuned Settings

I was in a client’s admin and noticed that after I updated a post there was an option to make a backup. I also received a question from a client asking whether she should back up because there was a notice that she could. There’s a setting where you can turn off those reminders–especially nice for clients who might want to back up after every post, which is unnecessary with the auto backups running.

In all, I think it’s going to be an excellent solution for WordPress security too (restore after being hacked). Unless you have heard of a better backup system for WordPress with all of these features?