How to Backup WordPress Site to Dropbox

WordPress empowers more than a quarter of websites on the Internet. However, unfortunately, it also often becomes a target of an attack. If you run your website on WordPress, you should always create a backup and save it on a cloud storage service like Dropbox.

By dint of this post, I am going to show you how to backup your WordPress site to Dropbox. So, let’s get started.

Getting Started

First of all, we are going to look for a plugin. Honestly, I’m not happy with the state of the WordPress plugins in this category, at the time of the writing.

Most of the backup plugins are bloated with overly aggressive upsells and promotions and are shipped with unpleasing UI that doesn’t go with the WordPress admin UI as a whole.

After some deliberation, I’ve finally settled with BackWPUp plugin. Despite the name that’s rather hard to pronounce, it’s a neat plugin and intuitive in use. Once, you’ve installed it, you will find a new menu as seen below.

Creating a Job

Next, we need to create a “Job” within the plugin that defines how the backup should operate. So you name the Job, select what to backup, set the archive type and the name format, and most importantly, select where the backup should be stored. In this case, we should select the Backup to Dropbox option.

Now, we need to connect the plugin to Dropbox.

Connecting to Dropbox

When you select Dropbox to store the backup, the plugin adds a new tab on the Job settings page.

In this setting page, select the “Get Dropbox App auth code” button. This will direct you the Dropbox authentication page, and you will be provided with the authentication code to put it in the field, as follows:

Additionally, you can name the directory in which the plugin will store the backup in Dropbox, as well as the number of backups to keep.

Creating a Backup

There are two ways to create a backup; manually or by a schedule. You can set the schedule from the Schedule tab in the Job settings. For the moment, however, we will just create the backup manually so we can see immediately how the backup runs.

To do that, go to the BackWPUp > Jobs, hover over the Job we just created, and select the “Run Now” option. Now we just need to wait until the process complete. It may take a while if your site is bulky.

Once the backup is complete, you can find it in your Dropbox app directory.

Wrap up

We’ve seen how easy it is to create a backup in a WordPress site, that you don’t even need a developer to it. And I can’t stress enough how important is to backup your WordPress site.

So besides backing up regularly, you should always create a manual backup before changing anything on the website, even before updating the theme or the plugins. Do let us know if this tip was helpful.