WP Time Capsule Review: Free WordPress Backups in the Cloud

By Deepak Kanakaraju in Blogging — May 23, 2017

If you are a blogger, and if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, daily backups are very important. There are many paid plugins and services that help you do this. But some are better than the others.

Free backup solutions do not always help you back up into the cloud. Most of the free solutions take backups and store it on your own server – and it makes your own server slow and bloated with several copies of the backups.

Also, most of the solutions take full backups of your blog periodically and it makes every backup very heavy. So far, VaultPress was one of the plugins which helped take incremental backups and store it in the cloud. But VaultPress is a paid plugin and it would cost $5 a month per website. Also, VaultPress doesn’t help you store your files in DropBox or Google Drive.

I recently discovered WP Time Capsule and it looks like the solution I’ve been waiting for. It has a paid version, but the free version does the job very well. With WP Time Capsule, you can take backups to your DropBox account, Google Drive or Amazon S3 account. And best of all, it’s free.

The free version takes daily backups for the past 15 days and any day if your site goes down due to an error or some other reason, you can choose one of the backups and restore it to that day. As the name suggests, it works like a time-machine and it can take you back to a specific day.

You can install the plugin directly from the WordPress plugin repository.

After installation, you have to follow a few simple steps to connect it with your DropBox or Google Drive account. Once you have connected it, WPTC will start taking a backup of your entire website.

The first backup might take some time because it takes a full backup of your website. The future backups will be incremental backups where only the changes will be backed up.

In the WP Time Capsule dashboard, you will be able to see restore points that go up to the last 15 days.

The Pro version of WP Time Capsule costs $5 a month and it takes backups for the past 30 days. It will also help you stage an update where you can check your website on a staging server before updating your WordPress version.

Updating WordPress is a nightmare for many webmasters because sometimes an update could break the entire website. WP Time Capsule’s pro version also takes a complete backup before you update your site.

I am a customer of VaultPress already and I am using WP Time Capsule’s free version too. I will publish a review of the pro version of WP Time Capsule soon and also compare it with VaultPress.

Thanks for reading this review. Go ahead and install WP Time Capsule for your blog right away if you are using WordPress. Even if you are using some other backup plugin, it is a good idea to have extra WP Backups!