BackupBuddy Reviews & Product Details

Used to be good. It has all the features I need, Cloud Backup with Stash for all my client sites, fully automated Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

BackupBuddy has become unreliable lately. I would estimate 40% of the good backups don't work when you want to restore them. By good I mean BackupBuddy marked the Backups as good.

When you want to restore the backup, eg for migration. It creates tons of issues, 500 errors, or the site restores in default WordPress mode instead of the actual customer site.

BB Support is unwilling to help, even though I have a lifetime license and it's cleary their fault. They want me to buy a support package. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

it backs everything up, and can save to their cloud storage Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Terrible support.

They take over a week to reply (and this has happened multiple times over the last year). If requiring support on more complex issues is frustrating with any back and forward if they read the issue wrong because you are back waiting for a reply.

If using their hosting - its a long time to be offline and very frustrating (so their hosting is not a smart choice if you need uptime or reliability).

If using the backup product - its a long time to offline trying to restore and the tool not working.

Either they are understaffed, don't care, or have given up and are just letting things run themselves.

Support is important, and they don't have any, so its best to steer clear - its too risky and stressful.

Another note, the products are expensive but that's OK if the support was good - but it's not.

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Nothing - The whole process from start to finish is just about getting your money, Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

They hide their refund policy at the bottom of the page and when you complain that you can not use their products because they are incompatible with your hosting provider, they just refuse to give the money back. They don't even offer to contact your host. They've had $42 out of me for doing nothing. Daylight robbery. When they sell back up buddy, they should have a pop-up or warning to check with your host provider first. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Everything. Seriously... this is an amazing tool. As a 20+ year developer, I can say that after having tried a dozen backup tools, both free and paid. This tool just works. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing. It works solidly every time. Updates by the developers are frequent and bugs are fixed quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This app never actually did what it said it would, so there is nothing good for me to say about it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I purchased Backup Buddy to protect my wordpress site before I migrated it from a slow server. It timed out every time, and was unable to complete a full back up. I had to download a free app which had no trouble backing everything up before I could safely move my site. I had the app for less than a day and they refused to refund anything. Waste of my time and money, very disappointed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The deployment feature would be very interesting, if it worked as promised. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'm very unsatisfied with BackUpBuddy. After months of thinking about whether it was the right product for me or not, I decided to give it a go, and it's such a shame they don't give you any way to try it before you buy it, nor do they give you your money back if it doesn't work or you don't like it.

Support is ridiculous, each ticket takes between 3 and 7 days to get a reply.

There is no forum to ask your question or browse previously addressed issues.

The many cool functionalities the plugin provides, work like 10% of the times, on the same installations in which other free plugins work perfectly.

The migrator needs you to type in DB details manually, even if a previous wp-config.php already exists. Every time you do a migration/push you have to clear the whole directory, and import the new site.

Deployment is useless, it never works for a reason or another. When it does, it takes forever to transfer a few files because they are being sent one by one instead of being zipped on the source and unzipped on the destination. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like how easy it is to back up, migrate and duplicate a Wordpress website. Though there are necessary steps, but I think there is no better way of doing a safe migration other than BackupBuddy. The backing up is very simple, one click and it is readily doing it's job. Best thing is, you can schedule the backups when to happen automatically without you worrying. Every month you can ran as many backups as you like schedule depending on the how often you make changes on your website. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Probably the lengthy steps. You have to go to MySQL page and set everything up. But I guess it is a necessary step in order to start a database from scratch, rather than overwriting from an existing one. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I use the BackupBuddy plugin for a wordpress website, it allows the option to download back ups for the site itself and the back-end database, very easy and quick process to give some ease of mind that data won't be lost. It will also tell you the date your site was last backed up which can be useful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not a dislike but a nice addition would be that BackupBuddy runs automatomatically after a set amount of time and sends the download to an offline location. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

BackupBuddy is one of the most user-friendly platforms I've encountered to date. As soon as you activate the plugin, they provide you with a simple form, where you can fill out your backup preferences. You can also customize how often you'd like automatic backups to be performed, which has saved me a lot of time from having to remember to perform manual backups. Additionally, BackupBuddy is not a subscription based service, so there is no monthly fee. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The customer service aspect of BackupBuddy has declined recently. It is difficult to find a knowledgeable service rep that can help you determine the root of your problems, and to have your problems fixed quickly, especially if it involves restoration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We now use backupbuddy on all our wordpress sites. You can schedule it out and daily or weekly. We have used it to migrate & restore sites. This is not the least expensive option - but worth the cost. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We typically host all our clients accounts - but some prefer to use their own. So many, many issues with Go Daddy - and quite frankly, we encounter the most annoying issues (time-outs) with Go Daddy. There have been several updates as of late which have helped - but IMHO you do have to really go through the tutorials and learn how to use it. When I see issues that others are having - you can generally tell they have not set it up correctly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Backup buddy has saved me many times and its easy to roll back. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I ready dont have anything I dont like support could be a bit faster. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It has a friendly name and they have a gold license you can own this piece of garbage for life. Yay! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Backups continually timeout and never work consistently. If you have anything, but the most basic of Wordpress installs with very minimal data, this plugin just won't work. And if you have any sort of advanced setup with your Wordpress config for a dev, staging and production environment, ImportBuddy will fail cause it's confused.

Update July 31: Just an update on this review. I actually managed to get a backup to work. I was bringing on a new client so I tried to use Backup Buddy on their old server. Backup Buddy failed on this server as usual. I had help from their support and they said the old server was underpowered. I ended up using Wordpress Time Capsule to perform a full backup on the old server and after moving the site to the new server, I tried Backup Buddy again, since the new server is beefier and it actually worked. So Backup Buddy might just work as long as you have a powerful server to run it on. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is very easy to set up. You are guided through the whole process of creating a backup schedule and file destination. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I do not have any dislikes. Sure there are some hoops to jump through when setting the backup destination (Google Drive for example) but that's not BB's fault. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's easy to add to the website and setup Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have never found that it gets a full backup. Things like widgets or custom CSS are missed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Migration of websites and connecting to Google Drive Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Fails often when server resources are low or for unknown reason Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ease of use and installation and the fact that it runs backups in your sleep—and notifies you if anything is awry. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Restoring data is a tad cumbersome. You don't have to be a total techy, but technophobes will be overwhelmed and turned off, and even people who are somewhat tech savvy but are in a stressful situation (of potential data loss) will find it scary and overwhelming. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ease of use - setup - support - wordpress migrations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Depending on the server, backupbuddy uses a lot of resources and can create some minute havoc when attempting migrations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

BackupBuddy continues to get better and better as time goes on. We started using it when we started to use other iThemes plugins (iThemes Security). We were offered a great deal on BackupBuddy and have not turned back. The plugin is very easy to us on our Linux-based hosting servers and there is almost no setup. On other servers you only need to change a few options (however, some web-hosting companies have this plugin blacklisted: see dislikes). Almost every migration from our development servers to our live hosting has gone off without a hitch. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My only dislike of BackupBuddy is that they have not created a plugin that allows ONLY off-site data backups. GoDaddy, for instance, blacklists BackupBuddy because it uses too much data and takes too much processing. I may be wrong, but I feel if BackupBuddy came up with a solution for such a large web-hosting company that they might be able to sell their product more. We have had some issues with BackupBuddy not realizing Unicode differences from one database (MySQL) to another. We have to manually edit the SQL and upload on our own. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.