VS
There was a time when UpdraftPlus Backup really was at its highest level shines saving the day when it comes to saving backing up and migrating to another server even to a different domain or subdomain. Lately, it doesn't deliver as much as before, mostly I've experiences what many complains on forums such as Stackoverflow and other well-known WordPress Backup groups. Everyone agrees that UpdraftPlus Backup now often than not get stuck on its own, not because you're trying to save to a cloud-based drive such as Dropbox or Google Drive, it won't even save to FTP nor locally. It just get stuck at the middle of the process. All the help manual from its official website didn't bring any solution, more confusion actually. And think about the hundreds of websites that you have to maintain, complete nightmare isn't it? Nope updating it several times won't get rid of the bugs.
So what's the solution? For me it was Duplicator.
I'm not championing Duplicator as the sole savior, but it is at the moment the most peace-of-mind, one-click-set-it-forget-it plugin compare to UpdraftPlus Backup. But there is a catch, it only allows you to backup up to 500MB anything above you'll have to pay for the Pro version. With all the compressor and gzip and the cleaning/skinning of database tools out there available to us, you could bring an eCommerce website down to below 500MB space total! So unless you're running a big corporate company that hogs more than 500MB of data space for a website, Duplicator Pro is your best choice. For me the free Duplicator version works just as fine. Most important to remember when using Duplicator free version is to set its settings to DupArchive, as it allows a different method than a zip compressed file that most hosting server won't allow but with DupArchive it basically bypasses that so you can start using Duplicator as fast and reliable as it should be.
I will tell you in details the steps to make Duplicator work for you. In the meantime, download Duplicator, install and activate it if UpdraftPlus Backup keeps failing your expectations and always brings your nightmares.
First thing after you finished downloading the plugin, you need to activate it and then you will come to this point see screen shot below:
Click on Duplicator now and the first thing you should do is click on Settings and then click on the tab Packages.
Under section Archive make sure you set it to DupArchive as this will enable most database and files folders in a large scale (lots of tables lots of files etc.) to be saved properly. I really think this is the only feature that beats Updraft, the reason Updraft keeps failing in the middle of its backing up large files and other numerous tables while Duplicator using its own DupArchive method ensures that no matter how large your tables database are no matter how big your uploads/plugins folders are, DupArchive will do its job as it should. Now make sure you save the changes in this setting before you proceed.
And that's all there is to setting it up! Easy isn't it? Well you could go on to the Schedule tab or the Storage tab to choose when to backup at what time and day and where do you want to save them locally or over cloud drive (cloud drive storage is only for paid version).
So now that you've done all the above, it's time to create the backup. Click on Package menu on the left side (not the Package tab thats just for settings) and click Create New, name the backups to whatever you want and leave everything else untouched. Click Next. It's scanning so just wait for it. You should arrive at this stage see below.
As you can see mine went way over the 500MB limit under the free plugin. If yours doesn't appear such warning, you're free to click on Next. But if you get like what I have, you have 2 choices: either you buy the Pro paid version here, or you click Back and enable filter/select the folder that you do not want to be backed up, let's say you have a very large uploads folder and this folder you can simply export in a different way (through FTP or File Manager Zip Archive).
After you have selected which folder not to be included in the backup, you need to scan one more time.
And here's what I have, all the green "go" and it's safe now to click on "Yes I Agree" and then click Build to proceed.
Let it do its thing until it reaches 100%. And you're done! It all works out and your package is available under the Package menu.
Now you're wondering what happen to the folder "uploads" that was not included in this backup, well that folder "uploads" you'll have to go through FTP or to your hosting File Manager and manually Zip the entire uploads folder, download it and then upload it later along with the duparchive that Duplicator created. This requires its own tutorial page and I'll show you how to migrate your backup to another domain/hosting using the same plugin Duplicator. Until next time...so stay tuned!