Celebrate World Backup Day with UpdraftPlus

World Backup Day carries a lot of importance for UpdraftPlus. As a WordPress plugin that helps millions of users around the world backup their websites and data daily, we cannot stress the importance of backing up your website and files strongly enough.

Even though the reliability of hard drives, online servers and virus protection has improved greatly in the last few years, many people reading this blog will almost certainly have memories of losing files, Word documents, photos, websites or videos during the early digital age – before reliable, affordable cloud storage and backups were commonplace. While every day is World Backup Day for UpdraftPlus, March 31st serves as a reminder every year that we no longer have to take the very real risk of losing all these important files anymore. A simple backup with UpdraftPlus that takes just a few seconds, can keep your site and files safe for as long as you want them. 

As anyone who has ever used a computer, programme or online service for any period of time will know – crashes, failures, conflicts and viruses are a part of life. It usually isn’t a case of ‘will I encounter a problem?’, rather than ‘when will I encounter a problem?’

As you can imagine, as an organisation that devotes so much time and effort to backups, we have heard countless stories down the years from people all over the world who have lost years of hugely important data and information that they have spent a lot of time and money developing. Thankfully, with UpdraftPlus installed, they were able to restore their site to a previous version and regain access to all their lost content. UpdraftPlus – the world’s leading WordPress backup plugin – can help you make sure that you never have to join the ranks of those unfortunate people who realised all too late, the importance of backing up your website. 

World Backup Day was started in 2001 by digital consultant, Ismail Jadun. This particular day was selected as it is the day before April Fool’s day. Ismail felt that people would associate the connection with April Fools Day, as it was hoped that potentially losing all your files and work would feel like being victim of a particularly bad prank.

On March 31st, it is encouraged that people all over the world share the backup pledge: “I solemnly swear to backup my important documents and precious memories on World Backup Day, March 31st.”

UpdraftPlus has a range of backup packages to suit all of your backup needs. Installed by over 3 million users all over the world, our easy-to-use interface allows you to backup and restore your website with a single click. You can also set the schedule to backup automatically as often as you like, so you don’t have to worry about forgetting to backup your site manually and will always have a recent upload of your site ready to go – should the worst happen. 

Download UpdraftPlus today for the most secure, reliable and highly rated WordPress backup plugin.

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How to fix UpdraftPlus failed backups

UpdraftPlus is the world’s most popular and leading WordPress backup plugin, with over 3 million active installs. Users all over the world are using UpdraftPlus to safely and securely backup their WordPress sites, files and databases should they ever need to restore their site if the worst happens. As with any plugin, programme or piece of software, issues can arise when trying to carry out a function, such as when creating a backup. In this blog we will go through the most common reasons that you may be causing failed backups and how to fix them. 

  • Update plugin / Plugin conflict 

Probably the most common issue a user of UpdraftPlus would run into is not having an up to date version of UpdraftPlus. While older versions will still work, problems and conflicts can be caused by not keeping your plugins up to date. If you are having a problem with the backup of your site not completing, always check to make sure you have the latest version of UpdraftPlus installed first.

Another issue you could potentially face is if a new plugin you recently installed is causing a conflict with UpdraftPlus. Deactivate any new plugins and try backing up again. Common causes of conflicts are plugins loading their own versions of JavaScript libraries or cloud storage APIs on the UpdraftPlus page. These can prevent UpdraftPlus from starting a backup or uploading the backup files to remote storage.

  • Not connected to remote storage location / Remote storage full

An update to your remote storage location, such as a change of password or folder structure, could potentially be the cause of any issues you may be having, when trying to back up to remote storage.

To check if this could be the problem, try verifying and resaving your remote storage settings. For cloud storage services which use OAuth verification (such as Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive), you may need to re-authenticate with your storage account

To reconnect to your remote storage location, go through the full ‘add remote storage’ option again at UpdraftPlus > Settings. Here you can re-authenticate to your remote storage account of choice.

Remember to click the ‘Save changes’ button and then attempt another backup.

As with any remote storage location, there is a finite amount of space. The reason that your backup is failing to complete could be that there is not enough space for UpdraftPlus to save the files to. Check your remote storage space and delete files or purchase extra space if necessary.

  • Backup files too big – Reduce the backup archive split size to 100Mb or lower

Aside from the above issues users of UpdraftPlus may encounter, such as not having the remote storage location properly setup, the most common technical reasons for a backup failing to complete is that you are trying to backup a file that is too large to upload or the file on the server is too large to process. 

In the situation where the file is too large to upload, this can be caused by some plugins creating databases or files that are many hundreds of MB large. These large files can cause UpdraftPlus to time out and not complete the backup. You should always aim to reduce the backup archive split size to 100MG or lower if possible. 

To reduce the archive split size, open the ‘Expert settings’ section of the UpdraftPlus Settings tab.

In the ‘Split backups every’ option, set it to 100Mb. Remember to press the “Save changes” button at the bottom of the page and then run a test backup. 

If you have a large file on your site that cannot be split up as it is a single file (such as a large video file), it is recommended increasing the PHP time limit (and possible memory limit)

To increase the PHP time limit, you need to edit the ‘wp-config.php’ file on your WordPress site. This file is located in your WordPress site’s root folder, which can be accessed via an FTP client or file manager in your web hosting control panel.

Open this file in a text editor, paste below code in the ‘wp-config.php’ file just before the line says ‘That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging.’

set_time_limit(300);

Remember to save your changes and upload the wp-config.php file back to your server. This new code will tell your server to increase the PHP time limit to 300.

Refresh your site and attempt another backup. You can increase the time limit again if needed.

Additionally, you can also try increasing the memory limit. The process is very similar to the time limit and requires you  to edit the wp-config.php file on your WordPress site. This file is located in your WordPress site’s root folder, which can be accessed via an FTP client or file manager in your web hosting control panel.

Paste the following code in the ‘wp-config.php’ file just before the line that says ‘That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging.’

define( ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’ );

This new code will increase the PHP memory limit to 256MB for your WordPress site. Once done, remember to save your changes. Open your WordPress site again after making the changes and hopefully, you will now be able to complete your backup.

If the file is just too large and keeps causing problems, you can also exclude this particular file from the backup process. We also recommend using a WordPress cleaning plugin to help reduce the size of any large databases or files you may be trying to backup. WP Optimize is a free and highly rated plugin from UpdraftPlus that can be used to clean up your database.

  • Hosts/server issues

If the issue of large files was the cause of the backups failing, it could point towards a problem with your backup server, such as very low server resources available from your web-hosting platform. Selecting a higher level hosting platform could help your website backup easier and quicker, as it will be dedicating more resources to your website.

If there are still issues with your backup not completing, there could be other issues with your host/server. In order to ascertain what these may be, we would recommend that you ask the UpdraftPlus support team to investigate your PHP error logs. These logs will hopefully contain more information on the exact issues that are causing the non-completion of backup problems. 

To find the file, you will need FTP access to the server for a PHP log (also applied to remote storage). For WP Debug log which will contain the error information, it can be found at the following location

The following plugin: WP-File Manager will help you find the files with the extra information you require. 

  • Broken scheduler 

If scheduled backups are failing to start or backups freeze partway, it could indicate there is an issue with the scheduler within your WordPress installation. “Backup Now” starts the backup without the scheduler, but uses the scheduler to schedule a resumption of the job in case it needs more than the amount of time that the webserver allows in one go. Problems with the scheduler will affect any scheduled backup plugin that you try – as well as various other tasks that WordPress and other plugins schedule internally.

For a full and extensive list of what broken scheduler issues can entail and how to fix them, please view this link. This page goes into detail on how to fix the following:

  1. Maintenance mode
  2. No visitors
  3. Disabled schedulers
  4. Loopback connections are not working
  5. External cron jobs
  6. Password protected websites

If you are still having issues after having tried all the above fixes, please contact us via our customer support form and we will do our best to help you resolve the problem.

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How to reset an UpdraftPlus licence

How to reset an UpdraftPlus licence. When choosing which UpdraftPlus Premium package is right for you, one of the primary decisions when making your choice is the amount of licenses you will require.

We have structured the UpdraftPlus packages to best suit the needs of the various different types of users who require a Premium WordPress backup service. As such, there are 4 different packages you can purchase, depending on how many different sites you would like to install UpdraftPlus Premium onto:

  • Personal – 2 sites
  • Business – 10 sites
  • Agency – 35 sites
  • Enterprise – Unlimited

Up until recently, UpdraftPlus licences have been permanently assigned to the site that you activate them on. However we understand that there are many situations in which a licence may have only been used; temporarily on a test site or clone for example. If you purchased the Personal package, it could be possible to use both licences on testing sites for just a few hours and have no licences left when you are ready to install UpdraftPlus Premium on your main site.

We want to ensure that UpdraftPlus customers have the best experience possible when using our product. As such we now allow users to reset their license, so that they can be used on other websites and are not ‘locked’ to the first site it is used on.

How to rest your licence

There are 2 methods you can use if you wish to reset and reuse one of your UpdraftPlus licences.

Method 1 – Self reset

Self-service licence resets are now available from your account page. To reset your UpdraftPlus licence yourself, please follow these instructions.

  • User deactivates UpdraftPlus plugin on the site
  • Wait 30 days
  • Go to My Account > Licences and find the licence
  • There will be a reset link to reset the licence so you can use it on another site.

Method 2 – Support team reset

Our support team can reset the licence for you if you wish. Just contact us via the support form: https://updraftplus.com/paid-support-requests/ with all the necessary details and we’ll reset the licence for you, so it can be used again.

Both of these methods will reset a licence and help you make the most of your UpdraftPlus Premium package.

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Updraft adds ability to perform atomic restore database restoration (UpdraftPlus 1.16.48)

The latest updates for UpdraftPlus 1.16.48 have now been released. This latest release of UpdraftPlus includes a number of features and tweaks to improve your backup and restore experience

Following lots of work and effort, one of the new features we have included is the ability to perform ‘atomic restores’. With this latest update, UpdraftPlus will now detect if your server has the required permissions and if available, will perform an atomic restore.

An atomic restore will restore your backup alongside your existing database before replacing the original. This means that should your site die during a restore of the database, you will no longer risk losing any tables, while still keeping your site up and running. You can then use UpdraftPlus resume restore feature to carry on with the restore process until it completes.

In a previous UpdraftPlus release we added a manual authentication feature to Dropbox. This allowed users to manually complete authentication if they were getting blocked by a security plugin or module on their server. UpdraftPlus have now extended this feature to include Google Drive and OneDrive, making it easier for users to connect to these services.

There are also a good number of tweaks and fixes included in this latest release to improve the overall performance of UpdraftPlus, such as faster deletes from BackBlaze, faster uploads to Google Drive and Google Cloud, more PHP 8 compatibility tweaks and many more.

The full changelog can be found below:

  • FEATURE: If needed database permissions are available then perform an atomic restore to improve chances of successfully restoring the database
  • FEATURE: Added the ability to manually complete authentication with Google Drive (Avoids issues where security modules/plugins break the authentication flow)
  • FEATURE: Added the ability to manually complete authentication with OneDrive (Avoids issues where security modules/plugins break the authentication flow)
  • FEATURE: Google Drive and Google Cloud now allow boosting chunk size for faster transfers
  • FIX: Files/Directories Exclusion not saving correctly when adding numeric directory/file names into the exclusion list
  • FIX: Different PHP versions generate different suffixes length in the temporary ZIP filename resulting in a chance of overlapping runs
  • FIX: an issue with mysqldump password character escaping
  • TWEAK: Avoid unnecessary database writes caused by redundant jobdata updating during backup of files
  • TWEAK: Add “anywhere in their names” syntax option to the exclusion UI
  • TWEAK: Bump the requirement for the S3 enhanced module, and for using the official AWS SDK, up to PHP 5.5 (in preparation for updating the SDK version later)
  • TWEAK: Fix a bug of report emails for incremental backups displaying incorrectly in many email apps
  • TWEAK: Update Select2 library to version 4.1.0-rc.0 to work around deprecated jQuery isFunction
  • TWEAK: Update jQuery-serializeJSON library to version 3.2.0 to work around deprecated jQuery isArray
  • TWEAK: Handle hosts that have disabled some of the PHP functions thus causing a fatal error on PHP 8
  • TWEAK: Correct under-calculation of used memory in verify_free_memory()
  • TWEAK: Fix (inconsequential to this point) double-use of identifier for SQL statement type
  • TWEAK: Remove some compatibility code in Dropbox downloading pertaining to a folder selection bug eliminated ~8 years ago.
  • TWEAK: Remove unneeded sub-site tables when performing a restoration/migration (Multisite)
  • TWEAK: Improve the exclusion UI by adding new “wildcards” option thus allowing the user to add a set of patterns for excluding files/directories
  • TWEAK: Integration of the new files that were previously added for abstracting UpdraftCentral’s client code
  • TWEAK: Excluded items (Files or Folders) that are not readable should not trigger a warning about being unreadable
  • TWEAK: Fix some RTL CSS issues
  • TWEAK: OneDrive 4xx error reporting
  • TWEAK: Update the Dropbox SDK to use refresh tokens (long lived token support ends September 2021)
  • TWEAK: implement a multi-delete capability when deleting from Backblaze
  • TWEAK: On UpdraftClone display the image ID in the advanced tools tab for easier debugging
  • TWEAK: Make it more clear in the restore log that we are starting an AJAX restore
  • TWEAK: The download backup HTML so that there is only one download button per archive type

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New UpdraftPlus translations added

We at UpdraftPlus have recently transferred a large number of translation sets from our dedicated translation project to the public project at translate.wordpress.org.

Once these translations are approved and released, this update will go a long way to helping UpdraftPlus become fully translated into over 50 different languages; with 25 languages already over 90% complete!

Of particular interest are these language sets, which have received a large number of new translations:

  • Bulgarian (1300+ new strings translated!)
  • Spanish (Mexico)
  • Turkish
  • Japanese
  • Danish
  • Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Indonesian
  • Chinese (China)
  • Chinese (Taiwan)
  • Greek
  • German
  • Russian
  • Polish
  • Dutch

If you are interested in completing these translation sets, you can submit your own translations here – https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/updraftplus/

Additionally, if you are interested in contributing to our own project (which includes translations for Premium features), you can find more information here – https://updraftplus.com/translate/

Many thanks to all our translators, both on translate.wordpress.org and our dedicated translation project team.

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