Backup & Restore Dropbox is a WordPress plugin that backs up your WordPress websites to the local storage or your Dropbox cloud storage, including both files and database, and use these backups to restore, duplicate, clone, or migrate your site to another location. Also as the name indicates, it uploads the backup files to your own Dropbox cloud storage as an offsite backup. It also provides a single user portal at WPAdmin to allow you manage multiple WordPress sites from one place.

To do a full local backup, go to Dropbox backup page in your dashboard and click the Create Local Backup button and the backup job will start automatically. Depending on the size of your website, it could take quite some time to finish the process.

Once completed, the job will be listed in the job list whether it’s successful or not. If the job were successful, the Restore button would appear in the Action column allowing to restore the site to this state, like the one shown above.

If there is something happened during the backup that caused the job failed, it will give it another shot to restart the job again. I had one job failed at first but still got the job finished successfully on the 2nd try.

Backing up to Dropbox is a bit more complicated. You will need to register an account at WPAdmin first, which is free, link your Dropbox account with your WPAdmin account, and then perform the backup to Dropbox right there. While having an account and manage your sites at WPAdmin are free, performing a backup job to Dropbox isn’t. You will need to purchase some credits beforehand to proceed, though only a couple of dollars per job, not expensive at all.

Each backup files are saved in a separate folder in Dropbox_Backup folder under wp-content. To restore a particular backup to a different host, copy the entire backup job folder to the new location under the same directory, and perform the restore job in Dropbox Backup page in the dashboard.

Verdict

Backup & Restore Backup is a well-coded, solid WordPress plugin that provides a reliable backup/restore experience to your WordPress websites. It gets the job done very well, even on the large sites that a lot of other WordPress backup plugins failed to generate the backup file because of the size of the site. It gets actively updated, rated at 4.2 out of 5 with more than 30K downloads, according to WordPress.

If you do choose to use this plugin to backup your website, let’s start with the full local backup first before jumping to your Dropbox. Most of the times, having a solid local backup is already good enough to your needs.