Solid Backups — NextGen Vs. Solid Backups

Solid Backups – Next Gen

vs.

Solid Backups &
BackupBuddy

In the evolving landscape of WordPress backup solutions, Solid Backups – Next Gen emerges as the cutting-edge option for website security and management.

While some users may still be operating with legacy solutions like Solid Backups or BackupBuddy, it’s important to understand how these older tools compare to the advanced features of Solid Backups – Next Gen.

This page provides a comprehensive comparison to highlight the capabilities offered by the next-generation solution.

What’s the difference?

Solid Backups &
BackupBuddy

Solid Backups
– Next Gen

Solid Backups — NextGen places backups in the context of a Timeline view that shows additional information about significant changes to your website. This can be invaluable for understanding which backup you might wish to restore. For example, by viewing which plugins were installed, activated, or updated between two daily backups, you can choose to restore the backup from just before a site issue began to occur.

By contrast, Solid Backups (formerly BackupBuddy) has an “activity log,” which is a server-level and line-by-line account of exactly what happened during any of the processes (backup, restore, remote send, etc). This was developed as a critical piece of Solid Backups because all processes were handled on your site, where we (the company behind the product) had no context or control. The logs were our best way of being able to spot when things went right or wrong in making a backup.

In Solid Backups — NextGen, there’s no need for users to have access to logs of that granular detail because it’s all happening on our servers, and not dependent on anything beyond being connected to your site.

Solid Backups — NextGen is managed entirely within a centralized dashboard. This eliminates the need to manage settings in a plugin.

(Solid Backups — Legacy, formerly known as BackupBuddy, is a plugin. Solid Backups — NextGen has a plugin to connect itself to sites. It is a service, at its root.)

The core idea of Stash Live was that it would allow a customer’s site to be backed up constantly to a storage destination provided by SolidWP. This is precisely what Solid Backups — NextGen does.

Solid Backups — Legacy allows users to customize the contents of a given backup via profiles. Currently, ZIP files downloaded from Solid Backups — NextGen will contain a complete backup regardless of how incremental the actual backup operation might have been at the time it ran. (complete means the latest version of every file)

The very nature of Solid Backups — NextGen eliminates the need for additional destinations. This is a cloud-first product, leveraging the SolidWP’s cloud infrastructure. Your backups are automatically sent to a cloud-based destination. A second party such as Stash, Amazon S3, or Dropbox is not necessary.

We may incorporate additional third-party options at some point, if there is expressed interest in that as a solution. For now, we’re fairly convinced that the value of the Solid Backups — NextGen platform is that you don’t even have to worry about remote storage. It’s already remote!

See above.

See above.

SolidWP previously announced that its Solid Backups — Legacy product was removing support for Google Drive backup destinations. As of October 25, 2024, no new backups will be added to Google Drive remote destinations. Existing files already stored in Google Drive are unaffected, but the ability to transfer files between Google’s servers and your WordPress website is impacted and will cease to function.

Solid Backups — NextGen is a cloud-first product utilizing Liquid Web’s infrastructure. As a cloud-first product, backups do not use the resources of a user’s hosting environment (the traditional means for PHP-based backups). Because the method of backing up is fundamentally different, local backups are neither necessary nor supported.

At launch, we’re not supporting deployment (being able to take a backup from one site and deploy it to another one), but this is one of the things we’re most excited about Solid Backups — NextGen and the cloud-based backups it provides opening up to you. 

No promises on a timeline, but being able to move a site from one spot to another is definitely on the roadmap. We’d love to hear how you might use that feature here.

See “remote destination” above. The sFTP server is essentially just a generic remote destination. Users who were using that option should be thrilled to not have to fiddle with the actual moving of the sites to the remote destinations.

This is another one that could become high priority given enough interest. Right now we backup automatically and daily. Once the system has been battle-tested, we might look into custom schedules. Let us know how you’d use that feature here.

ImportBuddy (renamed the “standalone importer”) required much technical understanding and expertise, and even then was not all that reliable due to wildly different server configurations. Whatever solution we build for importing needs to take into account how folks are using it, and we’re open to hear about those workflows and how Solid Backups — NextGen can be used to meet those same needs.

We’d love to hear how folks might use it in the new system. Provide your feedback here.

Solid Backups — Legacy allows users to display a comprehensive list of the directories and their corresponding sizes (including subdirectories) that make up their websites, with an option to browse an interactive graphical directory “map.” As these are resource-intensive operations that create a drag on the hosting server, Solid Backups — NextGen does not currently include these features, but if something like this would be useful to you, we’d love to hear how and why you’d use it here.

Solid Backups — Legacy includes functionality to clean up temporary data files.

Solid Backups — NextGen does not create files of this nature on the hosting server, making this unnecessary.

All users of Solid Backups — NextGen also have access to Solid Central, where they can make use of the build-in database optimization tools, which include deleting stale transients.

Solid Backups — NextGen does not currently include importer functionality (see “Import a Backup” above)

Solid Backups — NextGen does not facilitate storing backups locally, so this setting is unnecessary.

Solid Backups — Legacy allows users to customize which WP user roles have access to Solid Backups. The Solid Backups — NextGen primary user interface is within Solid Central.

Currently, it is possible to share access to Solid Backups — NextGen with any other Solid Central user, as part of Solid Central’s account sharing feature. Note: this requires sharing access to the entire Central account (including all connected sites and backups for any other connected sites that use Solid Backups — NextGen). The Solid team is evaluating options for user roles within Solid Central that will allow for more granular sharing of access to resources like Solid Backups — NextGen. We’d love to hear your feedback about how you might use this here.

Solid Backups — Legacy allows users to configure various options around email notifications.

Email notifications for Backups — NextGen are being planned.

Solid Backups — NextGen currently includes the entire WordPress database in each daily backup.

Do you have a special situation that would make excluding specific database tables a helpful feature? We’d like to hear more.

Solid Backups — NextGen currently backs up all plugins (whether active or not) in the initial backup. Subsequent backups will only include files that have been changed or added, so inactive plugins do not increase storage requirements for each backup in the same way that they did for Solid Backups — Legacy.

Solid Backups — Legacy allows users to configure various options around email notifications.

Email notifications for Solid Backups — NextGen are being planned.

Same timeline as deployment. 

Download a Backup Zip

Restore to Production

On-Demand Backups

File & directory exclusions

93% of businesses have experienced data loss, and 52% of them reported that they had to recover from a data loss incident at least once in the past year.

FAQ

Contact us

Your Solid Backups — NextGen purchase includes a one-year subscription for ticketed support from the Priority Support Team and updates we release while your subscription is active. We recommend renewing your subscription for continued access to updates, support, and new features.

Yes. Solid Backups — NextGen backs up your WordPress database, plugins, files, themes, scripts, posts, settings, widgets, plugins, and everything else in the WordPress database and file system. You can optionally include additional database tables or exclude directories.

Cloud-first means that we are initiating the backup from SolidWP’s cloud servers, using cloud resources to operate the backup, and then storing the backup in the cloud. The fact that all of the horsepower comes from our side means we are not taxing the resources of the hosting server and that creates a massive performance gain.

This is completely different from how BackupBuddy/Solid Backups and other plugin-based backup solutions work. With those products, a plugin uses your hosting server’s resources to initiate and schedule your backups. They also require the site to function in order to run, which consumes the same resources your sites need in order to perform well. The backups dramatically increase the disk storage a site requires. Moving plugin-based backups to “offsite” storage requires connecting to 3rd-party cloud providers or downloading backup files and managing them manually, which leads to a mess.

Using a cloud-native, server-driven approach simplifies the entire process for site admins. It allows sites to be reliably backed up and for backups to be placed in the context of a timeline of activity related to your sites in Solid Central, which provides a simple place to handle all the critical management and maintenance tasks associated with keeping your sites up and running.