Is Wordpress Website Backup Service Worth the Investment?

[Kingalan1]

I was horrified to learn that my hosting company, InMotion Hosting does not offer redundant backups, that it is on the customer to set up backups to ensure they don't lose their data.

I plan to back up to Google Drive 3 x a week for 12 backups and also create 3 backups on our server (Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday). So if something goes wrong and we catch it within a week we can generate the backup directly from our server.

There are website backup services such as BlogVault. Do they offer any meaningful advantages to taking the contents of the entire server (16 gigs) and backing it up? They do offer Malware removal. Does this have value?

Is back up on an external service like Google Cloud while simultaneously backing up on the server a safe way to proceed? If not, what is the simplest and most effective manner to backup? I prefer to avoid adding any plugins to WordPress as our site already has too many (about 30).

Thanks!!
Alan

[jasongmcmahon]

I agree with Salem,  UpdraftPlus is the way to go, though I'd pay for the premium versions as you get support & help for $1 per week,

[salem4e]

i am using updraftplus - free version

it automate the backup to my AWS S3 bucket , and i think it's better than many paid plugins

[effectdigital]

With web hosting companies it depends upon, whether you have literally just bought the hosting space alone (to save as much money as possible) or whether you have bought a bundle that contains other services. Even an automated backup solution is part of their product so usually it does cost extra (depending upon who you go with, of course!)

If a deal seems too good to be true, it usually is

I'm not sure about any of the auto-backup services you can plug onto a WordPress site, but I'd be extremely wary of any automated malware removal to be honest. On my desktop PC I often script little tools to help me out or make my workflow more efficient. Because they don't fit the 'mold' of what regular software is 'expected' to do, they often get flagged by my own AV (falsely) as malware

A lot of malware shields these days look for 'unusual' items instead of 'harmful' items. This makes me wonder, if you innovated and designed  / developed something really cool on your site - would the malware shield strip it out? Then if your site gets hit and you have to restore it, you might lose out on some of your site's unique architecture and functionality just because it didn't fit the 'norm'

On a desktop environment I know that there are lots of spam-tools produced to solve problems that don't exist, which can often make a machine run worse than before. A good example of this are all the sh*tty driver update and registry 'mending' softwares which just leave your system a steaming pile of garbage. Anti-malware can be good but it does have the propensity to go OTT and for the devs to get extremely lazy, building tools that seek out unusual applications instead of damaging ones (prejudice in coding)

I would assume that for web-based software, the same problems would creep in. So personally I'd try to be smart in terms of what I installed and how I protected the site, but rather than having some half-ass malware-strip on backup - I'd probably just do the backups without any 3rd party intervention. When you back up your site, you know it's working. Why would you want to automatically alter the backup as it's saved, in a way which might break it upon restoring the site's image? Seems like an unnecessary risk sold as a product to me