How to Set Up WordPress Auto Backups to Google Drive, Dropbox, & S3

If your WordPress site crashes, you won’t want to be stuck with a backup from 2 months ago. Or worse, no backup at all. Your site changes, new customer data, and fresh content will all be lost forever.

This happens more often than you’d think.

Manual backups work in theory, but they’re easy to forget. Most website owners start with good intentions, planning to back up their site every week. But life gets busy, and backup schedules slip.

Automatic backups are my go-to solution for this problem! They work in the background to protect your site without any ongoing effort from you.

Setting up reliable automatic backups isn’t complicated. With the right steps, you’ll ensure your WordPress site is always protected.

Here are the key takeaways:

• WordPress doesn’t have built-in backups: You need a plugin like Duplicator to automate the process and protect your site from crashes, data loss, or malware.
• Choose your backup frequency: Set up hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly schedules based on how often your site changes and how much traffic you get.
• Store backups in the cloud: Connect third-party storage like Duplicator Cloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, or Amazon S3 to keep your backups safe off-site.
• Templates save time: Create custom backup templates to include only the files and database tables you need, or use the default full-site backup.
• Set it and forget it: Once configured, automatic backups run in the background without any ongoing effort, so you’re always protected.

Table of Contents

Quick Summary: How to Set Up Automated WordPress Backups

Why Should You Automatically Back Up Your Website?

As a WordPress website owner, you’ll need to create regular backups. This is a security measure in case anything goes wrong.

If you experience data loss, malware, hard drive failure, or other common WordPress errors, you can simply restore your most recent backup files.

To protect your website, you could start manually backing up your site. However, you may not remember to do this consistently.

It’s much easier to set up automatic backups.

With an automated backup schedule, your site files and database will be backed up every month, week, day, or hour. Depending on how often you want your data saved, you can customize your WordPress auto backups to meet your needs. 

What Happens If You Skip Automatic Backups?

Most WordPress site owners think about backups after something goes wrong, not before. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• A plugin update breaks your site. Without a recent backup, you’re manually reverting files and hunting down database changes. That’s hours of work, assuming you can recover at all.
• Your site gets hacked. Malware can sit undetected for days. If your most recent clean backup is from last month, you’ve lost weeks of content, orders, and customer data.
• Your host has a server failure. Hosting providers back up their servers, but most only keep 1-7 days of snapshots, and restoring from a host backup can take 24-48 hours.
• You accidentally delete something. WordPress has no undo button for deleted pages, posts, or database records. A backup is the only way back.

In each of these scenarios, the difference between a 3-minute fix and a multi-day crisis is whether you have an automated backup running in the background. Let’s set that up now.

How to Set Up Automated WordPress Backups

Automatic backups keep your website from being vulnerable. So, let me show you how to create automated WordPress backups!

Here’s a quick overview:

• Install an automatic backup plugin: Backup plugins like Duplicator allow you to schedule backups every hour, week, day, or month.
• Create a backup template: Define the data you want backed up when the schedule runs.
• Connect cloud storage locations: Set up third-party cloud storage locations to keep your backups safe.
• Create a backup schedule: Choose a frequency, storage location, and template to automate the entire backup process.

Step 1: Install an Automatic Backup Plugin

By itself, WordPress doesn’t back up your site.

To start saving your data, I’d suggest installing a backup plugin like Duplicator. I use this tool to create manual backups and automatic backup schedules for my WordPress site.

It’s also a migration plugin, so it can move your WordPress installation to another host, server, or domain name. Plus, this can be helpful when you’re moving content to a staging site. 

Here are some more helpful features you’ll get with Duplicator Pro:

• One-click restores
• Disaster recovery
• Large site and multisite support
• Cloud backup storage
• Remote restores for cloud backups
• Drag-and-drop migrations
• Step-by-step migration wizard
• Backup email summaries
• Backup encryption
• One-click staging sites
• Extra free plugins (with Duplicator Elite): WP Media Cleanup, DB Optimizer, and Activity Log

See how the Clio Websites web design agency protects its clients from downtime with Duplicator’s automatic cloud backups!

To start automatically backing up your WordPress site, choose a subscription for Duplicator Pro. There is a free version of the plugin, but the premium version includes scheduled backups and remote storage options.

Then, you’ll need to install and activate Duplicator.

After this, find Duplicator Pro » Settings » General. In the License Key field, paste the license key you got with your purchase.

Click on Activate to finish the setup process. 

Step 2: Create a Backup Template

Before you create a WordPress auto backup schedule, you’ll need to build a template for it.

In Duplicator, templates control how a backup is built. You can customize your template with specific files and database tables that you’d like backed up.

Head to Duplicator Pro » Tools » Templates. Here, you’ll see a default template. This will automatically build a complete backup of your WordPress site.

If you want your automatic backups to include all your files and database tables, continue to the next step.

However, you might want to create a custom template for backups. Click on Add New.

At the top of the page, name the template. Edit the backup file to only include the data you want to be backed up.

For example, you could do just a database backup.

You can also select a custom combination of files to optimize your site backups. Feel free to only include active plugins and themes. You could also exclude non-WordPress files or your media library.

When you’re happy with these settings, hit Save Changes. 

Duplicator allows you to create multiple schedules, so you could set up different templates for specific auto backups. This can help you back up the right parts of your site at the right time.

Step 3: Connect Cloud Storage Locations

By default, Duplicator will save your site backups to a local server. It also supports these external backup locations:

• Duplicator Cloud
• FTP
• Google Drive
• Dropbox
• Microsoft OneDrive
• Amazon S3
• Wasabi
• Google Cloud
• DreamObjects
• Vultr
• DigitalOcean Spaces
• Cloudflare R2
• Backblaze B2

If you want to use any of these third-party storage locations, you’ll need to connect them with Duplicator. To do this, find Duplicator Pro » Storage » Add New.

Then, give it a name. Using the Type dropdown, select the cloud service you want to use. For this tutorial, I’ll be using Duplicator Cloud.

You can authorize Duplicator Cloud with your Duplicator Pro license. Another way to connect to cloud storage is a connection token.

If you use third-party storage, it’ll be a similar authorization process. Dropbox has you click on an Authorize Dropbox button.

This will open a new tab. You’ll have to confirm that Duplicator will make changes to your Dropbox account. Copy the authorization code.

Go back to your WordPress dashboard and paste the code in Step 2 to finish the setup.

Now you can automatically save your backups to a cloud storage service! 

Step 4: Create a New Backup Schedule

When you need to automatically back up your WordPress site, you can easily set up a schedule in Duplicator. First, go to Duplicator Pro » Schedule Backup » Add New.

On this new page, name your backup schedule. Then, select a template. This can be Default or the custom template you created earlier.

Next, choose a storage location. You’ll see a list of options that you’ve already authorized.

Customize when your backup will run. Duplicator gives you the option of monthly, weekly, hourly, or daily backups.

You’ll also need to select a Start Time. This will start the backup process at a certain time of the day.

After you make these changes, scroll to the bottom of the page. Check the box next to Enable This Schedule.

Finally, save the schedule. You can view your new WordPress auto backup on the Schedule Backup page.

Using these details, you’ll know when the schedule was last run and when your site will be backed up next.

When the time comes, your backup archive and installer will be available as downloadable zip files.

How Often Should You Back Up, and What Kind of Backup?

Before you leave that schedule running, two decisions are worth a few minutes of thought. Get them right, and the schedule looks after itself.

How Often to Run It

The right backup cadence is however much work you can afford to redo. Match it to how often your site changes, not to a number that sounds responsible.

Your site	Backup Frequency	Worst case if it fails
Static site that’s rarely edited	Monthly	A month of small edits
Blog publishing weekly	Weekly	One post
Active blog or membership site	Daily	A day of posts, comments, and signups
Store taking orders	Hourly	An hour of orders

Whatever cadence you pick, run one extra backup before you update WordPress core, a theme, or a plugin. Updates are the most common reason people need the backup they just made.

Full, Incremental, or Real-Time?

• Full backups copy everything every run. They’re simple, and restoring only takes one file. The cost is time and storage on a large site.
• Incremental backups copy only what changed since the last run. Lighter on your server, but a restore stitches several files together, so there are more ways for it to go wrong.
• Real-time backups capture changes as they happen. Worth the cost if you’re taking orders, and overkill if you aren’t.

Duplicator takes a different route to the same outcome. Instead of incremental runs, you build separate templates and give each one its own schedule, so you can back up your database hourly (where the orders, comments, and posts live) while your files run weekly (where almost nothing changes).

You get frequent protection on the data that moves without recopying your entire uploads folder every hour.

How Many Backups Should You Keep, and Do They Work?

These two questions arrive later, once the schedule has been running quietly for a while. They’re the difference between having backups and being able to rely on them.

Set a Retention Limit Before Storage Fills Up

An unattended hourly schedule will fill a cloud storage account faster than you expect. Duplicator handles this with a Max Backups setting on each storage location.

Set how many backups to keep, and once the limit is reached, the oldest one is deleted automatically to make room.

Test a Restore Before You Need One

Test one restore after you set the schedule up, then once a quarter.

Restore a recent backup to a staging site rather than over your live site. Duplicator allows you to turn any full-site backup into a staging area for testing.

Check three things: the homepage loads, images actually display (broken images usually mean the uploads folder didn’t come across), and you can log in.

A backup you’ve never restored is a guess. Backup testing once a quarter turns it into a plan.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

There are plenty of free backup tools out there! Read our full comparison to see which one is right for you.

Ready to Automate Your WordPress Backups?

You’ve just learned how to protect your WordPress site with automatic backups. No more setting reminders or worrying whether you backed up yesterday.

With Duplicator handling your backups automatically, you can focus on what really matters: growing your business and creating great content.

The best part? You only have to set this up once.

After you create your backup schedule, Duplicator works quietly in the background, saving your site data exactly when you need it.

Whether you choose daily backups for a busy e-commerce site or weekly backups for a simple blog, you’ll have peace of mind knowing your hard work is always protected.

Ready to protect your site automatically? Try out Duplicator Pro to schedule backups and never worry about them again!

While you’re here, you may also like these extra WordPress tutorials and showcases:

• How to Create a Cloud WordPress Backup
• How to Restore a WordPress Site To a Previous Date Without a Backup
• How to Protect Backups From Ransomware
• STOP Making These Website Backup Mistakes
• How to View Your WordPress Backup as a Working Website