If you’ve ever searched for the best WordPress back-up solution, you’ve likely encountered a slew of WordPress plugins that for the most part either allow you to send backups to a third-party storage provider or handle everything including storage.

Perhaps you’ve heard of these:

UpdraftPlus
VaultPress
BackupBuddy
BlogVault
All-in-One WP Migration

While most any WordPress backup will do the trick, many of them are resource-intensive and can be prone to errors.

I’ve been using ServMask’s DigitalOcean Spaces extension for about a year. It does the job. It’s not the fastest, but it works–until it didn’t. On February 3rd, 2021, I noticed that backups were failing. Something was up with ServMask’s DigitalOcean Spaces extension. I reached out to support and began the troubleshooting process.

In the meantime, I reached out to Simon Bennett over at SnapShooter.io and decided to give their new WordPress backup recipe a whirl. SnapShooter is famous for allowing you to take as many scheduled DigitalOcean droplet snapshots as you’d like. Currently, DigitalOcean will only backup droplets once per week. You can check out SnapShooter’s supported applications here.

I connected a droplet to SnapShooter and configured a WordPress backup to be sent to DigitalOcean Spaces every day at a specific time. SnapShooter also offers free storage depending on the plan you go for.

Within a minute or so, I was all set. Instead of waiting for the first back-up to generate automatically, I ran a manual one for a site roughly 15GB in size. This particular site is located at NYC1 and was being sent to NYC3 DigitalOcean Spaces.

A few things caught my attention. From start to finish, the back-up process was roughly 2x faster than the All-in-One DigitalOcean Spaces extension. In addition, the data was streamed to DigitalOcean Spaces instead of being temporarily stored on the droplet’s disk. The droplet also appeared to use fewer resources to perform the backup. All backups can be instantly restored from within the SnapShooter dashboard.

Verdict: SnapShooter is reliable, easy to use, and includes super fast support. I highly recommend SnapShooter for WordPress backups. In addition, I’m always in favor of supporting fellow bootstrapped startups whenever possible!

I want to also mention that ServMask’s support team was top-notch and sent a plugin update within 24 hours that resolved the error.