A WordPress backup you have to remember to click is a backup you will skip on the week something actually breaks. A backup that only lives in wp-content/uploads is a backup that dies with the server. And a schedule that never cleans up eventually fills the disk, which can take the live site down with it.
That is the whole job in one sentence: run the backup without you, put a copy somewhere else, and prune old automatic archives before they eat the drive. Snapshotify Pro is built for that loop. Free covers manual backup, upload, restore, and migration. Pro adds schedules (daily, weekly, or monthly), Google Drive / Dropbox / OneDrive destinations, and retention that keeps the last N automatic backups.
This post is the practical setup: schedule, cloud folder, retention number, what happens when an upload fails, and why email notifications are not optional. It is not the migration runbook, and it is not the pre-update database-only ritual (useful, already covered). It is how you stop babysitting backups.
Same-server-only is still not a backup
If the only copy sits on the same disk as WordPress, a dead host, a wiped account, or a ransomware pass through the filesystem takes the site and the “safety net” together. We already argued that in A WordPress backup on the same server is not a backup. Local storage is fine as a fast restore path for a bad plugin update. It is not enough as the only plan.
Cloud storage is what turns a scheduled ZIP into something you can still open when wp-admin will not load. Snapshotify Pro uploads to Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox after the archive finishes. Free can download archives by hand; Pro does the offsite step on a schedule.
Free vs Pro in one glance
| Free | Pro | | — | — | | Manual full or scoped backups | Scheduled daily, weekly, or monthly | | Upload an existing ZIP, restore, migrate | Cloud: Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox | | Activity log, download, delete | Retention: keep last N automatic backups | | Email on finish or fail | Per-schedule exclusions for leaner archives |
Same plugin on WordPress.org. Pro unlocks the unattended half. Membership pricing lives on daftplug.com/pricing: one Pro licence unlocks Snapshotify plus Progressify, Lightify, Generatify, and Rankify. Plans differ by site count, not by feature list. New Pro plugins join existing memberships.
Set the schedule (General)
Open Snapshotify → Settings → General.
Pick a frequency by how much work you would be willing to lose:
- Daily for stores, membership sites, and anything with orders or form entries every day
- Weekly for content sites that publish a few times a week
- Monthly for brochure sites that barely change
Scheduled backups are full by default (exclude nothing). That is the setting you want unless size is a real problem. Turn exclusions on only when you have a reason: five independent checkboxes for WordPress Core, Media Library, Plugins, Themes, and Database. You cannot exclude all five. The settings screen refuses that, because a schedule with nothing to back up would be skipped.
Core is a reasonable first exclusion (re-downloadable, version recorded in the manifest). Media is the usual second (often most of the size). Excluding the database is almost never right. Posts, settings, users, and orders live there.
These exclusions apply to scheduled runs. Manual backups have their own exclusions in the create dialog, so you can schedule a lean weekly cloud backup and still take a full one by hand before a redesign. For update day, a fast database-only WordPress backup is complementary; keep that as a separate habit, not a replacement for the scheduled full (or near-full) archive.
Large and shared hosts get batched work so tight PHP timeouts do not kill the job halfway. You do not need to babysit the browser for a Pro schedule to finish.
Connect cloud, then set Backups Location (Storage)
Open Snapshotify → Settings → Storage.
- Connect Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox from the provider card.
- Approve the consent screen. Scope is app-folder only.
- Set Backups Location to that provider. Connecting alone does not start using it.
Folder layout (deliberate narrow access):
| Provider | What Snapshotify can see | Folder | | — | — | — | | Google Drive | Only files this app created (drive.file) | Snapshotify/ | | OneDrive | App folder only | Apps/Snapshotify/ | | Dropbox | App folder only | Dropbox app folder |
The plugin cannot read the rest of your Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox. That is intentional. A backup plugin has no business browsing your other files.
Do not reorganize that folder by hand in the provider’s web UI. Move or rename an archive yourself and Snapshotify may lose sight of it. Reconcile treats a missing cloud copy as gone (demoted to local if a local copy still exists, or dropped from the list if not). If the provider API is unreachable, nothing is removed from the list. An outage never deletes your rows.
Several sites can share one cloud account. Each site gets its own folder named after its host, so archives do not collide.
Uploads are chunked and can resume if interrupted. That matters on multi-GB sites and flaky connections.
Retention: keep last N, deletion is permanent
Without retention, scheduled backups accumulate until the disk (or the Drive quota) fills. A full disk is a new outage wearing a helpful costume.
Under General, Pro retention keeps the last N backups and deletes older ones. Deletion is permanent. Think of the count as how far back you can go:
| Frequency | Keep | History | | — | — | — | | Daily | 7 | About a week | | Daily | 14 | Two weeks, if disk allows | | Weekly | 4 | About a month | | Monthly | 6 | About half a year |
Corruption and bad changes are often noticed late. A plugin update that quietly breaks something may not surface for a week. If every remaining backup is newer than the problem, they all contain it. Keep more than feels tidy.
Watch cloud quota the same way. A full Google Drive means uploads start failing. Retention is what keeps that from becoming a quiet month of local-only archives.
When a cloud upload fails
An upload failure never fails the backup.
If the archive cannot reach Drive (or Dropbox / OneDrive), the backup still completes locally and the reason lands in that backup’s activity log. You get a working backup in the wrong place rather than no backup at all.
How to read the list: if Backups Location is set to cloud and a row still shows Local, the upload failed. Open that backup’s activity log. Do not assume a green “finished” means the offsite copy exists.
By default Snapshotify keeps a local copy after a successful upload, so you have two. That is the safer default. Turning local copies off (via the snapshotify_keep_local_copy filter for developers) only makes sense when disk space truly forces it. With local copies off, a deleted cloud file or a bad reconcile leaves you with nothing.
Turn on notifications or the schedule is theater
Open Snapshotify → Settings → Notifications.
Scheduling without notifications is the most common mistake in this whole setup. A schedule that has been failing silently for a month feels exactly like a schedule that works. You learn the difference on restore day.
When notifications are enabled, Snapshotify can email on:
- Backup completed
- Backup failed
- Restore completed
- Restore failed
Keep backup failed on always. Keep backup completed on at first so you can confirm the schedule runs; many people mute success mail later, which is fine if failures still arrive. A success email that suddenly stops can also tell you the schedule stopped firing entirely (a job that never starts never “fails”).
Send mail to an address a human actually reads. Defaults to the site admin address. Cancelled jobs do not email, because you cancelled them on purpose.
If nothing ever arrives, test whether the site can send mail at all before blaming Snapshotify. WordPress mail fails silently more often than almost anything else on a host.
A sane default stack
For most production sites:
- Pro schedule: daily (or weekly if the site barely changes)
- Scope: full unless media is huge and already mirrored elsewhere
- Storage: connect the cloud account you already check, set Backups Location to it
- Retention: keep 7 on daily (14 if disk and quota allow)
- Notifications: at least backup failed, preferably completed too for the first few weeks
- Still take a named manual (or database-only) snapshot before risky updates
That stack survives a forgotten Monday, a dead server, and a Drive that would otherwise fill forever. Restore and migration stay on the same plugin when you need them. Schedules and cloud are the part that stops you from relying on luck.
Membership note
Snapshotify Pro’s schedule, cloud destinations, and retention sit on the DaftPlug Pro membership with the rest of the suite. Free on WordPress.org is enough for a one-off manual backup, restore, or migrate. The hands-off half is what pricing unlocks across every DaftPlug Pro plugin, with plans that differ only by how many sites you activate. Fourteen-day money-back.
Takeaway
Schedule the backup. Send it to Google Drive (or Dropbox / OneDrive). Keep the last N automatic copies so the disk and the quota stay usable. Read a Local row on a cloud-configured site as an upload failure, not as success. Turn on failure email so silence cannot masquerade as protection.
That is the difference between “we have a backup plugin installed” and “we can actually put the site back.” Snapshotify is built for the second one.