How To Properly Backup WordPress Site on Google Drive?

The plugin we are going to use is UpdraftPlus which can be installed easily from WordPress repository. To install this plugin, go to Dashboard >> Plugins >> Add New and search for UpdraftPlus. You will find the plugin named UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin on the search result.

Click on the Install Now button and wait until the plugin gets downloaded on your server. When it gets downloaded, you will see Activate button. Click on the activate button to activate the plugin.

The next step is running the plugin for initial one time setup. When you click on the activate button, UpdrafrPlus will redirect to plugin page and plugin setup page through its popup initial wizard messages.

If you missed this or skipped the message, you can simply go to installed plugins section and find UpdraftPlus plugin and open the set up page by clicking on setting.

This will direct you to plugins dashboard where you will find various options to backup WordPress site.

After reaching the plugins dashboard, you will again find setting tab. Click on the setting tab and configure the schedule for files and database.

You can choose whether you want to backup hourly, every 2 hours, every 4 hours or any schedule you want. The recommended time is at least once a day to maximum every 4 hours.

But it depends upon how dynamic the site is and the capacity of your server. If the site is a business website which is not required to change frequently, you may schedule backup for one day or more.

If the size of your site is high and you are on shared plan, it will not be suitable to backup it every hour as the backup process consume the servers resources which cause the site to load very slow.

Lastly, keep the backup rotation for at least 2 days (only recommended, it depends upon the size and nature of size). That means if you schedule daily backup, at least 2 backup sets are recommended and if you set the same for every 8 hours, then at least 6 rotation is recommended.

You can select Google drive as google provides more space and easy to use. As well as backing up to google drive is the only option available in the free plan of UpdraftPlus.

If you want to backup your site on Microsoft One Drive, Amazon S3, FTP, Azure or any other storage, you will have to pay at least $15 dollars a month.

These options are useful when the size of WordPress site is very large. For example, if the website has 8 GB files, you will not be able to backup to Google Drive having just 15 GBs of storage.

You can choose whether you want to backup WordPress site with plugins, themes and uploads and exclude any particular files among them.
By default, the exclusion rule excludes all the backup files created on your server storage by any plugins.

If you are using another backup plugin, you may need to exclude that path so that server will be able to backup WordPress site with low server resources.

After doing these, you can enable basic email report whenever the backup completes or fails to upload on Google Drive. Then save the settings.

When you save the settings, a popup will appear with a message to connect with the Google account.
If you are not sure about it, again go to settings tab (UpdraftPlus Dashboard) and find the Google Drive option as shown in the following image.

When you save the settings, a popup will appear with a message to connect with the Google account.
If you are not sure about it, again go to settings tab (UpdraftPlus Dashboard) and find the Google Drive option as shown in the following image.

Click on the authorization link and it will redirect you to your google accounts page. Select or login the google account you are willing to backup WordPress site on Google Drive.
Give authorization and by allowing required access to the drive. And the backup setup process is now completed.

After completion of the Installation, the backup process should automatically start. If it is not started already, you can do it by clicking on the backup now button.
The backup process takes some time depending upon the size of the site and the type of hosting server.