Just a quick little rant about backing up your Wordpress blog to Google Drive.
I love this idea, but at the moment it’s an example of why you can’t always trust what you read in a quick Google search. Dig deeper, my geeks.
There are two Wordpress plugins that you’ll see scattered around in the top search results for this topic: Google Drive for Wordpress and the simplistically-named Backup. However, look a little closer at those pages on Wordpress.org that describe the plugins.
Users rated GD4WP as a 3.6 out of 5, which is by no means stellar. 0 out of 1 of the most recent support threads have been address, and if you visit the support forum, you’ll see that most of the posters are angry or confused users posting responses to other angry or confused users. Backup is even worse, rated a 3.4 with a brutal 0 out of 5 support threads resolved.
I, for one, am about to install the much-less-touted UpdraftPlus Backup, which I found simply by searching wordpress.org plugins for “google drive” and ignoring unrelated plugins and the other two plugins mentioned here. I’m optimistic; it’s rated a 4.7, 60 out of 64 support threads have been resolved lately, and it’s got tons more downloads than the other two. If you guys want an update in a few weeks, let me know in the comments.
How did UpdraftPlus Backup work out for you? Do you recommend it?
Good question! I’d have to say the jury is still out. It worked great for one of my blogs, but the next time I tried to install it, I had a devil of a time getting it to authenticate using Google’s complicated API key security. So it never was able to write to my Google Drive. I’m going to give it one more shot and then make a decision. Stay tuned!
The other plugin I’m currently favoring is BackWPup. I haven’t tried the new version, but it seems to work quite well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support Google Drive, but it does do Amazon S3, Dropbox, and Microsoft Azure.
Since my Dropbox is rather full (and Dropbox is much more expensive than S3), I plan to set up S3 soon if UpdraftPlus continues to balk.
Ok, I’m currently endorsing Updraft Plus. Getting the Google API lined up is a little tricky (I may blog about it in future), but it works well once everything is authorized. Note: the browser you’re using for your WP dashboard can’t be logged into any other Google account when you authorize Updraft to use Google Drive.
Meanwhile, BackWPup has failed me. It was working well, but in my last tests using my most important blogs and the latest version, it was either timing out or throwing a code 15 error, which the dev says is also a timeout. My server is on Lightspeed, however, which is known to be temperamental on timeouts.