Backing up your desktop is one thing but for many of us that use WordPress we need to keep regular backups of our WordPress database and files in the unfortunate case our WordPress website is hacked, our web host crashes or we somehow delete everything. One tool that many of us use everyday is Dropbox and with a plugin or two it is possible to make sure our WordPress website is backed up regularly to your Dropbox account.
A couple requirements that you will need. Obviously a website powered by WordPress. While it is possible to backup a website powered by other content management systems to Dropbox I am only going to talk about WordPress. Second, you need a Dropbox account. If you don’t have a Dropbox account you can sign up for one at here.
WP-DB-Backup and Send To Dropbox
WP-DB-Backup is one of the most popular WordPress database backup tools available in the WordPress Plugin Directory. It can set to automatically run hourly, twice daily, daily or weekly and email you a copy of your WordPress database. Instead of filling your inbox with copies of your WordPress database though you can send your WordPress database to a custom email address using Send To Dropbox and your WordPress database will be save to your Dropbox account automatically.
This is a great way to make sure your WordPress database is backed up and available via Dropbox. Many people already use the WP-DB-Backup or a similar plugin that can email the database so it requires very little setup except for authorizing Send to Dropbox to access your Dropbox account and getting your custom Send to Dropbox email address. Unfortunately this will only protect your WordPress database and your images and theme files are not backed up.
WP Time Machine
This plugin makes it easy to backup both your database and files to Dropbox. Simply install the plugin and activate it. You will need to provide it with your Dropbox login and password. You can also set some options on how it stores your backup in your Dropbox, like what folder. Scheduling is not as nice however and you will want to be familiar with cron to have this plugin run your backups at regular intervals.
WordPress Backup to Dropbox
This plugin was just updated to offer you the option of transferring both your files and the database or just the database. It hooks up easily to your Dropbox account and offers decent scheduling. Depending on your web host you can run into problems with it not actually transferring your files to your Dropbox account which is annoying. On the couple of hosts I have tried it on I had roughly a 50% success rate. Shared hosts tend to have more problems with this plugin, but give it a try.
BackWPup
This plugin appears to do it all and can backup to Dropbox as well as a number of other online storage services like Amazon S3 and SugarSync. It offers scheduling and multiple backup jobs so you can schedule a database backup and a file backup separately. You could even schedule multiple backups to multiple services and even email the backup to you. I had no problem running the plugin but if you have a large blog you might want to break your backup up to no do everything at once to conserve your web hosting memory.
EZPZ One Click Backup
Despite the use of some Comic Sans font this plugin worked well when I tried it. Backing up to Dropbox is not built in to the free version of the plugin but is an extension you can add to the plugin. They charge $2.95 for the extension but do give you a trial to test if it will work for you. You can schedule your backup and and the plugin seemed to work with no problems. If only they had no Comic Sans font.
BackupBuddy
I could not actually try this WordPress plugin out since it is a paid service but according to the videos on their website it looks pretty impressive. They just added Dropbox backup support and also support Amazon S3, FTP, and Rackspace Cloud. Pricing starts at $75 for two websites.
Below is the video from their website on how to backup.
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