How To Backup WordPress To Google Drive For Free [Detailed Guide]

Backup WordPress to Google Drive – No matter what WordPress website you are running, creating regular backups on your local computer or on a cloud storage service is a mandatory task.

As a website owner, you should never ignore it. Of course, many web hosts like SiteGround and WP Engine offer their own automated daily and/or weekly backups, but you just cannot have a single backup location that is not fully under your control.

That is the reason why many WordPress backup plugins offer features that can automatically backup your WordPress site to Dropbox, Google Drive, and many other cloud services. 

So, in this quick and detailed guide, let us get to know how to backup WordPress site to Google Drive in simple and easy steps.

Why Backup to Google Drive?

The arguments to backup WordPress to Google Drive are simple and straightforward.

• With every Gmail account, you get 15GB for free Google Drive cloud storage space.
• Highly reliable cloud service. The chance of losing your backup is quite low. Unless it is your deliberate mistake.
• Highly secure service.
• You can access and download your backups whenever and wherever you want.
• If you want to, you can share your backups between your team.

Backup WordPress to Google Drive

To backup WordPress to Google Drive, we are going to use a plugin called UpdraftPlus. It is a free plugin available from the WordPress plugin repository. The good thing about UpdraftPlus is that you can configure it to automatically backup WordPress to Google Drive on scheduled time.

Features of UpdraftPlus Plugin

Some of the features of UpdraftPlus include but not limited to:

• The plugin can backup your site to a wide variety of cloud storage services, including Google Drive
• Automatic backup with scheduling
• Quickly restore both files and database
• Ability to select which files, folders, and components to backup and restore
• Download backup archive from WordPress dashboard
• Ability to encrypt database while backing up [pro feature]
• Options to duplicate or migrate your WordPress site
• Remote control backups of other sites from a single WP dashboard (useful feature if you have multiple WP websites)
• Slipt backups into multiple archives for large sites

and much more.

Note: though the process of setting up UpdraftPlus to backup WordPress to Google Drive is a bit lengthy, it is pretty simple and straightforward. I’ve divided the whole setup procedure into small sections and several steps. So, follow the steps and you should be able backup your WordPress site to Google Drive in just a few minutes.

Install and Active UpdraftPlus

1. To start off, download and install UpdraftPlus like any other WordPress plugin.

2. Once installed, activate the plugin and you are good to configure it to backup WordPress to Google Drive.

3. After activating the plugin, open up the UdraftPlus settings page by navigating to “Settings” and then “UpdraftPlus Backups.”

Setup the Schedule and Select Storage

4. In the settings page, navigate to the “Settings” tab. Here, we need to set up the automatic backup intervals for both the files and the database.

5. Simply select the backup frequency from the drop-down menu and enter how many backups you want to retain. In my case, I’m selecting the “Daily” option as the backup interval and “10” backups to retain.

This simply means that the plugin will backup my WordPress site daily and retains 10 backups at any given point of time.

6. Now, scroll down and select your backup destination as “Google Drive” next to “Choose your remote storage.” This action will bring forward some extra options and also gives you the “authorized redirect URI,” we are going to need that URI in future steps.

Don’t yet save the changes.

Configuring Google Drive

Before UpdraftPlus can backup WordPress to Google Drive, you need to configure Google Drive to activate Drive API and get the Client ID and secret key.

7. To do that, head over to the Google Developer Console. Here, click on the button “New Project.”

8. Now, enter the new unique project name and click on the button “Create.” For instance, I’ve entered my project name as “Bloggersignal Dev.”

9. After creating the project, head over to the “APIs” section under “APIs and auth” on the left sidebar.

10. Here, find the “Drive API” link under “Google Apps APIs” and click on it.

11. Now, click on the “Enable API” button. This action enables the Drive API.

12. After that, you need to configure the Consent Screen. To do that, click on the link “Consent screen.” Here, enter the Product Name of your choice and click on the “Save” button.

Of course, you can also fill all the optional blanks if you want to, it doesn’t matter.

13. Now, you need to create the client ID. To do that, click on the link “Credentials” in the left sidebar. Once the page has been opened, click on the button “Create new client ID.”

14. This will open up the “Create Client ID” module. Here, enter the details as follows.

1. Select the radio button “Web Application.”
2. Enter your full domain name (eg: http://www.example.com) in the “Authorized Javascript Origins” field.
3. Now, copy the authorized redirect URL from the UpdraftPlus settings page and paste it in the “Authorized Redirect URIs” field.

15. Once you are done filling the fields, this is how it looks like. Now click on the button “Create Client ID.”

16. This action will create the new client ID and client secret. Now, copy both the client ID and the client secret.

Configure UpdraftPlus to Work with Google Drive

17. Now paste those two in the UpdraftPlus settings page next to “Google Drive Client ID” and “Google Drive Client Secret.”

18. After that, simply scroll down and click on the “Save Changes” button to save all the changes you just made. This action will show you a notice indicating that you need to authenticate your Google Drive account. Just click on the link.

19. The above action will open the authorization or consent window. Click on the button “Accept” to allow UpdraftPlus to upload files to your Google Drive account.

20. You’ve successfully authorized UpdraftPlus to backup WordPress to Google Drive. From this point forward, UpdraftPlus will automatically backup WordPress to Google Drive as scheduled.

21. To test the settings, navigate to the “Current Status” tab, and click on the button “Backup Now.”

22. This action may open another screen, just click on the button “Backup Now” again.

Wrapping Up

That’s it, UpdraftPlus will now backup your site and automatically uploads it to your Google Drive account. Depending on the size of your site, the backup and upload process may take some time.

Once the backup and upload process has been completed, you can view all the current backups in the “Existing Backups” tab.

One thing to keep in mind is that since UpdraftPlus is uploading the backup files to your Google Drive account, it will not store any files locally. i.e, on your server.

So, make sure that you check the backups in your Google Drive account.

That’s all there is to do and it is that easy to configure and use UpdraftPlus to backup WordPress to Google Drive.

Hope that helps to properly backup your WordPress site to Google Drive. Do comment below if you face any problems following the above procedure or to share your thoughts and experiences about using UpdraftPlus to backup WordPress to Google Drive.

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