How to save a backup on Google Drive with Duplicator Pro
Making a backup of your website is a fundamental activity in order to have a history of all your contents on the website in case of malfunctions. However, creating a backup also means having available memory space to save it. With Duplicator Pro, the site backup can be saved not only locally, but also on external disks or in the cloud via storage services such as Google Drive.
To save the site backup to Google Drive using Duplicator Pro it is necessary to configure some basic settings. Seen the frequent requests from our customers we have created a guide. Let's see together how to do it.
Duplicator Pro: how to use it
To make automatic or manual backups of a website, it is recommended to rely on a dedicated plugin such as Duplicator Pro. We have already talked about how to make a site backup with Duplicator Pro, Of how to make an automatic backup with Duplicator Pro and of how to restore a backup with Duplicator Pro. In this article we see together how to save the backup on Google Drive saving disk space. However, before seeing the procedure for saving the backup to Google Drive, let's see what Duplicator Pro is and how to use it on your website.
What is Duplicator Pro
Duplicator Pro is a plugin designed to help you migrate, backup, copy and clone websites. It is a very simple to use plugin that provides increased website security. The Premium version of the plugin offers many useful features, such as it allows you to set up automatic backup systems and to save the backup directly to Google Drive, saving disk space.
How to set up Duplicator Pro
Setting up Duplicator Pro is very easy, once you install the plugin directly from your WordPress dashboard you need to configure the basic settings of the plugin: for example if you have purchased the Pro version you need to enter the license key provided after the purchase. To do this go to Settings, afterwards Licensing, find the field here License Key where you can insert and activate the license.
In the section Settings you will find further tabs in which you can go to customize the plugin settings. These are technical settings that concern the way packages are created (Packages) and archiving of the same (Storage). If you don't have technical skills, we recommend that you leave the standard settings or rely on a programmer to change the settings.
In this phase it is also possible to enter your own email address to which emails will be sent notifications in case of errors in the generation of backups. To do this go to the section Settings, click on the tab Schedules, in the field Email Address you can enter the email address of your preference where you will receive any error notifications relating to scheduled backups.
After configuring the plugin settings you can start using its features: in the section Packages you will be able to view all the backups made and make new ones manually, while in the section Schedules you can schedule your backups.
Save the Backup to Google Drive
When you decide to launch a backup manually or to define an automatic schedule on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, you can go and define where to save your backup.
By default, Duplicator Pro saves backups in Local, but if you want to save storage space on your disk, you can decide to connect the plugin to your Google Drive account.
To integrate with Google Drive, go to the "Storage", at the top right you will find the button "Add New“, click it. In this step, define a name of your new archive where all your site backups will be saved and then define the archive type. By default the field Type is set to Local Servers, but you can choose between several options:
- Amazon S3
- Dropbox
- ftp
- SFTP
- Google Drive
- One Drive
If you want to save your backups to Google Drive, choose it in the drop-down menu. You can then go on to make theintegration with your Google Drive accountby clicking on Connect to Google Drive you will see three steps: the first step requires you to authorize Duplicator to connect to your Google Drive, click on Authorize Google Drive access your account by providing the necessary permissions; the second step requires you to copy and paste an authorization code that you will get as the output of the first step; the third step finalizes the settings by clicking on Finalize Setup.
After connecting your Google Drive account to Duplicator you can decide on which folder to save the backup files going to define the name of the folder in the field Storage Folder and finally in the field Max Packages you can define the maximum number of backups to keep in the folder. We recommend keeping a maximum of 2 backups to avoid system overload. As a last step, click on Test Google Drive Connection to verify that the integration has taken place correctly and finally click on SaveProvider.
At this point, in the section Storage In addition to viewing your local archive, you'll see your Drive archive. This way, when you manually launch a backup or schedule an automatic backup, you can decide in which archive to save your backup.
