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Why I Switched to UpdraftPlus

I’ve been a BackupBuddy user and avid fan for several years. I love how easy BackupBuddy makes it to migrate sites – I build a lot of sites and do a lot of migrations. It’s a huge timesaver.

Last year when I started my WordPress maintenance company WP Minder I didn’t use the built-in backup service on my management dashboard. I stuck with BackupBuddy even though it required a manual setup on each of those client sites.

BackupBuddy had been rock-solid until about 1 month ago. At that time I started getting warning emails about BackupBuddy not completing: “Scheduled BackupBuddy backup started `4 days` ago likely timed out. The step function `post_backup` appears to have timed out. Check the error log for further details and/or manually create a backup to test for problems.”

This happened on 4-5 sites at first, then on a dozen, then on more than 25 sites I was managing. They were on different hosts, different servers. The plugin was up to date in all situations.

I got in touch with iThemes support right away; they have always been excellent. We went back and fourth for a couple of weeks with no solution. The last I heard from them was that my plugin must not be up to date (it was) and that the permissions on one of its directories were wrong (they weren’t). That was on 4/22 and that’s the last I heard from them. My support ticket remains unresolved.

Looking for other options…

Around that time I started looking for alternatives. I’d used UpdraftPlus frequently on other client sites and found it to work in situations with odd host setups where BackupBuddy would not. And I found that they had a Pro version with a lot more options, and that they had an extension for the management dashboard I use for WP Minder. All good things.

I replaced BackupBuddy with UpdraftPlus on about 10 of my clients’ sites. I’ve had no problems, errors, or warnings since from any of them. Yesterday I had to perform a one-click restore on this site you’re reading now and it went flawlessly.

I’ve continued to receive warnings from BackupBuddy where it’s still installed on client sites at different hosts, so today I’m making the full switch to UpdraftPlus for all of them. This is sad because I relied on BackupBuddy for so long, but it’s necessary. I have to feel I can trust the tools I use for clients, and now it’s going to be UpdraftPlus.