My FTP stopped working when I upgraded to UpdraftPlus Premium

If you could successfully backup by FTP with UpdraftPlus Free, but it stopped working when you upgraded to UpdraftPlus Premium, then this article is for you.

The cause of this issue is that UpdraftPlus Free only supports unencrypted FTP. UpdraftPlus Premium supports encrypted FTP, and will try to use it by default.

Unfortunately, some FTP servers indicate that they support encrypted FTP, but don’t. Usually the problem is firewalling – the firewall ports to allow encrypted FTP are not open. So when UpdraftPlus tries to connect, it times out.

One solution is to ask the operator of the FTP server to either:

• Make encrypted FTP possible (open up the firewall ports)
  or
• Configure the FTP server to not advertise itself as offering encrypted FTP (since it doesn’t work – though, you may wish to confirm this first e.g. by using a desktop FTP client)

Alternatively, you can force UpdraftPlus to drop back to non-encrypted FTP as follows:

1. Click on the ‘Show expert settings’ link towards the bottom of the UpdraftPlus settings page:

2. Check the “Disable SSL entirely” option.

After doing so, press the ‘Save Changes’ button.

That’s all!