May 4, 2011 
Last year Dropbox announced that they have 4,000,000 users, a number which is likely to double very soon. In case you’re out of the loop, Dropbox is a cloud-based storage and file sharing service. It’s become very popular, due to its ease of use and the basic offer of 2GB of free storage space.
A new plugin is available that gives you the opportunity to put Dropbox to work for the security of your WordPress site. Here’s how you can set up automatic backups of your WordPress site to Dropbox:
Step 1: Signup for Dropbox if you don’t already have an account.
If the free version is not enough space for you, you’ll need to purchase a plan that will accommodate your website backups.
Step 2: Install and activate the WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin.
It’s available for free in the WordPress plugin repository.
Step 3: Authorize the plugin with Dropbox.
After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll be prompted to authenticate so that the plugin can gain access to your Dropbox account.
Step 4: Select the day, time and how often you wish your backup to be performed.
The plugin’s settings page will show your next scheduled backup and how much space you have available. It also allows you to specify the folder in Dropbox where you want the backup to be placed. You have the option to store the backup locally as well.
One of the most handy features of this plugin is that it allows you to specify how many backups you want to keep, so that you don’t continually go over your limit with Dropbox.
Step 5: Wait for your backups to appear in the specified Dropbox folder.
Once you have the settings configured and have scheduled your backup, wait for a zipped archive of your website’s files and its database to be dropped in your Dropbox. Backups will be prepared automatically for you, so make sure to verify that it’s working correctly before you set it and forget it.
The bottom line is that you know you should be backing up your WordPress site. If Dropbox makes that more convenient for you, then by all means, take advantage of its services. You’ll be glad to find that backup in your Dropbox folder if your hosting fails.
Sarah Gooding on Google+
WP Time Machine does something similar:
http://wptimemachine.com/
Love this! I’m off to set it up now!
Seems like at least once a week I find something new that I can do with Dropbox…this will be a huge timesaver.
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Does this plugin backup the database or just files?
BackWPup does this too and a lot more! :-)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backwpup/
Just a tip for WP enthusiasts :)
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A quick word of thanks. I followed your clear instructions and it worked a treat. Another useful tool to guard against the unexpected! Thank you Sarah. (Thanks too to David Decker for his suggestion – I’ll follow that one up for some of my hosted clients with their own FTP space.)
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Better verify your backups…
The plugin, on my site, *appears* to work, but never actually backs anything up locally or in my Dropbox.
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Thanks for the haads up. I’d just checked a little earlier and realised and fed back to the author … shame … hope he can identify the glitch. Cheers. Martin
I wish there was a way to tell prevent dropbox syncing the backup to mobile devices. Guess in most cases you don’t want the backup to show up on your iPhone or iPad. :)
Still a very convenient approach even featuring versioning and a very durable storage.
cheers
Andreas
Hi!
Great plugin! But it doesn’t put a backup somewhere.. :(
It says: Backup started on 2011-05-06 at 12:06:21
But it never says ‘complete’ or ‘done’ or something. And I can’t find the files :(
Can you help me fixing it?
Thanks ;)
Cheers!
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Hi,
In multisite, do you “Network activate” or just activate it for the “Mothership”?
Cheers,
Terje
Terje – I don’t think it’s multisite compatible, but you can test it. ;)
Thanks Sarah. I installed it on the main blog (did not network activate). It does not seem to be working.
I’ve been using IDrive for my single sites and am just trying it with WPMU. Not 100% it will work. Although a dropbox user, I dig IDrive – especially as it has 5gigs free and does a backup only of amended files…
Anyone got any smart ideas on auto-backups for WPMU?
Cheers
Hi
I am trying to install this plugin but for some reason it wont work. I get the following error:
Fatal error: Cannot use string offset as an array in /usr/www/users/theurbj/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-backup-to-dropbox/wp-backup-to-dropbox-options.php on line 76
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
i agree with david decker – i have it installed on my site and it does exactly what it says on the description and more, including dropbox back up. best of all it’s free.
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Thanks Sarah for the writeup and everyone else for the feedback!
Based on all the feedback I have received I have made a whole heap of changes in the plugin to get it to work for as many WordPress users as possible.
I released WordPress Backup to Dropbox 0.8 a few days ago and you can read about the changes here – http://bit.ly/mAI8ZE
Keep up the good feedback!
Cheers,
Mikey
works great! my question is.. if I remove something, will it remove it from dropbox? (that would be the preferred setting)
Thanks for the great plugin!
Gday James,
That would be a great feature indeed, however at the moment it will not remove files from Dropbox that you have removed from your server.
Maybe in the future I will look at implementing it!
Cheers,
Mikey
Mikey,
I think what you would want to do is generate a file list of current files. Then when the backup runs, have it compare the files the files on the server with the file list, anything not there would be queued to be removed. And obviously anything new, uploaded. I can’t tell if the backup is incremental or not. You would want it to be incremental so your not re-uploading a bazillion files each time it runs. An image is an image, no need to reupload it. Part of this post is in ignorance of how dropbox handles similar files. It may only do incremental. (changed files uploaded). Anyway, awesome program! Thanks for the plugin!
Hi Sarah
Great plugin. Thank you.
I’ve one question:
Where can I set up ‘Backups to keep’ ?
In your post I see in settings that setting, but I don’t have the setting in my installation. I use the latest version 0.8.
Thank you in advance!
Stijn
great post,
thank you
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I used to separate my database and files to different backup system. This system is suitable for my client who want backup system for their blog. Thanks for sharing :-)
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