BackupBuddy plugin review and common issues

Stash connection issues are usually caused by an expired or revoked API key. Go to Solid Backups → Destinations → Stash and click Reconnect or re-enter your SolidWP account credentials. Ensure your SolidWP subscription is active — an expired license disconnects Stash access. If reconnection fails, log in to your SolidWP account at solidwp.com and verify your subscription status and Stash storage allocation.

Database errors during ImportBuddy restore usually mean the target database credentials are wrong, the database does not exist, or the database user lacks sufficient privileges. In ImportBuddy’s database setup step, enter the new database name, username, and password exactly as configured in your hosting control panel. Ensure the database user has been granted ALL PRIVILEGES on the target database. If the error persists, check your PHP error log for the specific MySQL error code.

Incremental backup scans all files to identify changes since the last full backup. If many files changed (after a plugin update, theme change, or large upload batch), the incremental backup will be closer in size and time to a full backup. This is expected behavior. If incremental backups are consistently slow, check for large cache directories not excluded from backup — caching plugins can create thousands of files. Add cache directories to the exclusion list in Solid Backups settings.

Solid Backups supports multiple backup profiles. Create a database-only profile and a full-site profile with different schedules. Go to Solid Backups → Schedules → Add New Schedule. Set the database backup to run daily or twice daily, and the full-site backup to run weekly. This reduces storage usage and backup time while ensuring frequent database protection — particularly important for WooCommerce stores where orders accumulate continuously.

Yes. In addition to Stash, Solid Backups supports Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, and FTP/SFTP as remote storage destinations. Configure additional destinations in Solid Backups → Remote Destinations. You can send backups to multiple destinations simultaneously for redundancy — recommended for business-critical sites where losing access to one storage service should not compromise your backup access.

Both are capable premium backup tools. Solid Backups includes proprietary Stash storage and ImportBuddy’s out-of-WordPress restore capability. UpdraftPlus is $70/year vs Solid Backups’s higher starting price, and UpdraftPlus has a larger user community with more tutorials. For users already in the SolidWP ecosystem (using Solid Security, Solid Central), Solid Backups integrates naturally. For everyone else, UpdraftPlus offers comparable backup functionality at lower cost.

BackupBuddy was renamed Solid Backups as part of SolidWP’s rebrand of all iThemes products under a unified brand. Existing BackupBuddy Pro licenses were migrated to Solid Backups equivalents. The core functionality is the same product with updated branding and pricing. Some users reported access and migration issues during the transition, which SolidWP support addressed on a case-by-case basis.

Yes, that can happen, especially on older sites with many plugins. This usually happens when the plugin, theme, and add-ons are updated out of sequence. In most cases, testing on staging catches the issue before it reaches the live site. From experience, backups and changelog reviews save a lot of cleanup time.

Start by checking whether another plugin already does the same job. In most cases, overlap is what creates avoidable conflicts and performance issues. A common issue is installing a plugin because it looks convenient without checking the stack first. From experience, a short compatibility review avoids most of the pain later.