Three things to do this World Backup Day

Author Andrea Howey

By Andrea Howey

31 Mar 2025
Company news Announcements, Backups, UpdraftPlus,

It’s World Backup Day (yes, it’s a real thing)!

31 March is the day when the good folks at World Backup Day remind us to back up what we care about.

Data plays an increasingly important role in all our lives, so it makes sense to protect it.

So, for our UpdraftPlus users, here are three super quick things you can do today to make sure your WordPress website is backed up and protected.

1. Schedule automatic backups

Make sure your backups are scheduled to run automatically.

If you’ve already set a schedule but haven’t checked it in a while, it’s worth reviewing to make sure it still works for you.

You can schedule backups to run automatically every 2, 4, 8, or 12 hours, or daily, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly, with just a couple of clicks.

If you’re a Premium user, you may wish to run backups at specific times e.g. 3am when server resources are high, or schedule automatic backups before updates.

2. Make sure backup reports are turned on

UpdraftPlus sends backup reports to the system administrator and syslog in WordPress (or send more detailed reports to any email address with Premium).

Whichever version you’re using, make sure backup reports are turned on by doing this now:

Open UpdraftPlus.
Go to the Settings tab.
Scroll down to ‘Email’ and make sure the box is checked.

3. Make sure you’re connected to remote storage

If you haven’t specified a location to back up to, by default, your backups are sent to a folder called UpdraftPlus in the wp-content folder.

We strongly recommend saving your backups remotely. If something goes wrong with your web server, you may only be able to restore your site if the backups were saved elsewhere

With UpdraftPlus, you can back up your WordPress website for free to the following locations:

Google Drive.
Dropbox.
OpenStack (Swift).
Rackspace Cloud.
Amazon S3 (or compatible).
DreamObjects.

If you’re a Premium UpdraftPlus user, you can back up to these locations too (you can even back up to more than one location for extra peace of mind)

Microsoft OneDrive.
SCP.
SFTP.
Microsoft Azure.
pCloud.
Google Cloud.
Backblaze.
WebDAV.
UpdraftVault.

Backing up to a remote storage location takes a couple of clicks.

Open UpdraftPlus.
Go to the Settings tab.
Click the logo of your preferred cloud storage provider.
Follow the prompts to authenticate UpdraftPlus and connect your backups.

The free version of UpdraftPlus works hard to protect your WordPress website (or your clients’ sites).

If you’re a Premium user (or if you’re considering an upgrade) you can familiarise yourself with all of the added protections in our free vs premium article.

About the author

Andrea Howey

Andrea is the Head of Marketing at Updraft WP Software.. She’s worked in B2B / Tech Marketing for more than 15 years. She’s equal parts passionate about good leadership and marketing best practice. Her experience lies in turning around and focusing marketing departments, understanding where the business needs to get to, then building high performing teams, systems, processes and plans to get there.