This review will be taking a look at BackupGuard Pro, a new WordPress backup and migration plugin. We'll be checking out the features, backend design, pricing, competitors, and more, to see if this is a good purchase for somebody looking to protect their most valuable digital asset: your website.

BackupGuard Intro

Backup Guard is a WordPress plugin, offering easy backups that can be stored locally or on many popular cloud storage platforms. It’s a relatively new entry to the crowded WordPress backup plugin sector, so it’s important to take a look at the features that it has the offer, and the price that it's offered at.

BackupGuard boasts four major features. The first one is a one click WordPress back up, where you can set up full or custom back ups of your website with a single click. When talking about custom back ups, they mean that you can select the directories and database tables that you want to back up. You can also quickly migrate your WordPress website using this tool. With it, you upload the website to the cloud, install the plugin on the recipient installation, and then download, extract, and install the word press website on the new server.

Backups can easily be pushed to the cloud, or hosted locally on your website.

How BackupGuard Works

It’s a pretty simple process. At predetermined intervals, the tool will automatically back up your word press website to either a local directory or a cloud location from Dropbox, Amazon S3, or other offerings. if anything ever goes wrong, you can easily restore from one of these many back ups, no harm done. You can also migrate, as we discussed above.

BackupGuard Features And Backend

The primary dashboard of the back up guard pro plug-in is the back ups page. Here, you can manually initiate a new back up, migrate your website to a new server all together, or restore, trash, or download from an individual back up.

As mentioned above, this plug-in has a heavy emphasis on being able to upload all back ups to a cloud location, adding redundancy to your website. The cloud back up tab allows you to easily connect with Dropbox, Google Drive, FTP locations, Amazon S3 or Onedrive.

All you need to do is toggle the service on, and then integrate via an Oauth process. We tested out our account with Dropbox, and Google Drive - both of the integration processes were incredibility quick and painless as they integrated directly with the existing login for the sites. There is no need to generate API keys.

With this plugin you have the ability to manually initiate a back up, or create a schedule for one. You can create multiple schedules, the back up your website to different locations and different time intervals. As you can see in the screenshot below, there is an hourly schedule, a daily schedule, and anything else you may need. A potential use case for multiple schedules would be a daily full website back up to a cloud host, an hourly back up of only your database to a local directory, and perhaps a monthly back up to yet another cloud location.

Also, because it's on AppSumo right now (talked about below), there's a sales YouTube video, if you'd like to check that out:

Security Plugin

The AppSumo deal itself comes with lifetime access to both this plug-in, as well as the security plug-in which is a sister product, that we were unable to demo it, and can’t really speak on the features that it offers.

Does It Work As It Should?

This tool works perfectly. We were able to easily migrate a website, manually initiate a back up and downloaded to our local desktop, and initiate a scheduled upload to a Dropbox location. We also messed around with custom back ups of only the database, which is helpful if you are publishing many blog posts and just want that redundancy without using up a ton of file space.

LTD Pricing

BackupGuard is currently available on the Appsumo marketplace, offering a lifetime deal. For $39, you can access the BackupGuard pro plugin, as well as the sister security plug-in for a one side license, and I will only cost you $39. For an unlimited side license, a one time purchase of $78 will give you lifetime access.

Due to the fact that it’s a solid product, and does everything as advertised, this looks to be a pretty good deal. However, we recommend reading the is "BackupGuard worth it?" section of this article before picking it up.

Standard Pricing

For a $25 lifetime usage plan (though only 1 year of updates and 2 site support), the standard pricing remains pretty competitive.

BackupGuard Free VS BackupGuard Pro

The main difference between the Free BackupGuard plugin, which can be found on the WordPress repository, and the BackupGuard Pro plugin is the addition of cloud and migration features.

Competition (UpDraft Plus)

This tool goes head to head with UpDraft Plus ($42/yr), a backup and migration plugin that we've used in the past. This plug-tn is definitely a lot newer, and rough around the edges, but it does as advertised, completely backing up a website to a cloud location without fail every hour, allowing us to download each of the back ups, and even allowing us to specify the directories and database tables that we would like to be included in a custom back up. It’s a cheaper offering, it is a serious competitor to the reigning champion of back up plug-ins, UpDraft Plus.

Is BackupGuard Worth It?

Yes, but no. Here's what I mean by that.

The current AppSumo deal is really good.

But, in our opinion, you shouldn't even be purchasing a backup plugin. Your host should offer dependable, server wide and application specific backup features, with automatic scheduling as well as manual over rides. If they don't, instead of looking for a new backup plugin, look for a new host. We use the following two hosts, if you're interested:

Rocket.net hosts our Agency Website & Blog as well as our other offerings like Oxidize and Plugin offerings.

Cloudways hosts about 80% of our client websites, and has incredible value to cost. Get 20% off with code "Isotropic".

Both of these hosts, as well as many others, offer complete backup solutions, meaning that there's no reason to spend money on a Backup solution.

So, this tool is a good deal, and if you need a backup plugin, go for it. But before you think about this, you may want to get a host that offers server level backups, and learn about WPCLI migrations (or use WPSyncro for migration, a really great tool).

The security plugin is a completely different offering, and comes in at $29-$79 per year (if you want to keep getting updates). Again, we couldn't demo this tool, so we can't speak on the features and functionality.

BackupGuard Review: Conclusion

If you're looking for a solid back up plug-in that will dependably upload a copy of your word press website to any of the supported cloud locations or your local directory and I said schedule, this is a great option for that.

It also comes with the ability to easily migrate websites to other servers, and will probably continue growing in features as it becomes more mature. However, you may want to consider switching your host to one that offers server level back ups before looking at an individual back up plug-in, as that would probably be a better use of your money.

We hope that this BackupGuard review was helpful for you. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out via our comments section!