If you haven’t heard of Dropbox I highly recommend checking it out. If you are already a reader of our Dropbox hacks, you are going to love this one too.
Dropbox is a file sync service that seamlessly syncs your files across PC, Mac, Linux, and other mobile devices like iPhone, Android phones, iPad, etc and make it available on the web. You can sign up for a free 2GB Dropbox account here.
How to Backup WordPress to Dropbox?
I have looked into backing up my WordPress sites into Amazon S3 cloud but I just wanted a simpler way to get it back. And I love Dropbox hacks.
So, instead I started looking for a way to backup my WordPress database as well as files to Dropbox.
A WordPress plugin by Michael De Wildt – WordPress Backup to Dropbox does the job well.
Just upload the plugin and activate it in your WordPress site. Then you use OAuth (your credentials are not stored in the plugin – that’s a great thing) to authenticate to Dropbox.
Once you have done that, then you can specify various options to store backups locally and the folder name for your Dropbox backup. Then you can set the schedule for your automatic backups.
You can also choose how many backups you would like to keep. This is important so you don’t run out of space in your Dropbox account.
Here are a few things that would be nice to have in the plugin
- An option to set backups more frequently like daily. Current minimum is weekly.
- Ability to backup WordPress install files as well with ability to exclude certain directories
- Ability to specify a custom time (easier for testing than waiting for the hour mark) – not a huge deal though
I have looked at a few other WordPress plugins but this one is by far the most simple and elegant solution so far. Please let me know if you know of a better alternative.
Download Backup WordPress to Dropbox
Check out my WordPress plugins page for more plugin suggestions.
