UpdraftPlus is the most installed backup plugin on WordPress, and deservedly — it is dependable, it has been around forever, and it does what it says. So when we built Must-Have Backup we were not trying to beat it at making backups. We were trying to change what a backup costs.
This article is one test on one site, run twice with each plugin. The interesting number turned out to be not how long a backup takes, but what the second one costs when nothing has changed.
The site and the method
- Site: WordPress 7.0.4, PHP 8.3, WooCommerce 11.0, on Plesk — a real shop with products, orders and media, not an empty install
- Plugins: UpdraftPlus 2.26.6.26 and Must-Have Backup 0.3.0, both active, neither configured beyond defaults
- Method: each plugin ran two consecutive full backups with no deliberate changes in between, driven from WP-CLI so nothing depended on a browser staying open
- Measured: wall-clock duration, and the exact byte growth of each plugin’s own storage directory before and after every run
Measuring the storage directory rather than trusting a progress bar matters, because “backup complete” tells you nothing about what it cost you.
The result: what the second backup costs
| Two identical backups in a row | UpdraftPlus | Must-Have Backup |
|---|---|---|
| First run — stored | 486.4 MB | 448.7 MB |
| First run — duration | 40 s | 39 s |
| Second run — stored | 486.5 MB | 3.74 MB |
| Second run — duration | 36 s | 14 s |
| Second run — files written | 7 | 5 |
| Repeat cost vs first run | 100% | 0.8% |
Nothing on the site changed between the two runs. UpdraftPlus stored the whole site again: 486.5 MB the second time, 100% of the first. Must-Have Backup stored 3.74 MB, and finished in a third of the time.
That 3.74 MB is not a rounding error, it is the floor: it is the database dump. The file content was already stored, so it was not stored again — five files were written, not thirteen thousand.
Why the difference exists
UpdraftPlus builds backup sets. Each run packages the site into zip archives — database, plugins, themes, uploads, others — and that set is complete and self-contained. You can see it in its own interface: two runs, two sets, 972.9 MB of disk between them.
Self-contained sets are a genuine virtue — any one of them stands alone, and you can hand a zip to anyone. The cost is that the model has no memory. The second run cannot know the first already stored those files, so it packages and writes them again.
Must-Have Backup keeps a content-addressed store instead. A snapshot records what the site looked like; the content it points at is stored once. Between snapshots it also records every database write, which is what turns the timeline into something continuous rather than a list of restore points.
What this means for how often you can back up
This is the practical consequence, and it is the whole reason the number matters.
At 486 MB per run, backing up this shop hourly would write 11.7 GB a day. Nobody does that, so they set it to daily and accept that a bad afternoon costs them every order placed since midnight. The retention settings in every scheduled backup plugin exist to manage exactly this problem.
At 3.74 MB per repeat run, the arithmetic stops being a constraint. You are not choosing a frequency to protect your disk quota — which is why the model can afford to record continuously between snapshots instead of just taking more of them.
Restoring: pick a set, or pick a minute
This is where the two plugins stop being variations on a theme.
UpdraftPlus gives you a list of backup sets and a Restore button beside each. You then choose which components to bring back — database, plugins, themes, uploads, others — which is genuinely useful when you only broke one thing. What you cannot choose is when: the restore point is the moment that backup ran.
Must-Have Backup opens on a screen called Restore — time machine, and instead of a list of backups it shows a list of things that happened to your site:
Every row is a group of changes with a count attached — plugin updates, posts and pages, site settings, users, media. You click the one that ruined your afternoon and land just before it. If you know the exact time, there is a “pick an exact minute” field instead. And under Advanced, you can take different moments for specific tables or folders — restore the orders table to 14:32 while leaving everything else where it is.
The safety model is worth noting too. Restoring is explicitly two steps: Build restore (staging) assembles the recovered site alongside the live one without touching it, and only then do you promote it, with an atomic swap. You get to look at the result before it becomes your website.
We did not run a destructive restore on the live demo site for this article, so we are not putting a number on restore speed. But “choose a backup set” and “choose a minute, then inspect it in staging first” are different products, not different settings.
Where the backups go
Both plugins send backups off the server, and this is the one category where UpdraftPlus is clearly ahead on breadth. Its settings screen offers Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Google Cloud, Backblaze, FTP, SFTP/SCP, WebDAV, pCloud, DreamObjects and even plain email:
Must-Have Backup covers Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Amazon S3, FTP, WebDAV and local storage. Fewer names — but with one behavioural difference: every snapshot is uploaded to every enabled destination, and you can add several destinations of the same type. A background worker handles the queue, and the Storages screen shows exactly how many jobs are pending, running, done and failed rather than leaving you to guess whether last night’s upload finished.
If you need Backblaze or pCloud specifically, UpdraftPlus is your answer today. If you want two copies in two places without configuring two schedules, ours does that by default.
Encryption: who can read your backups?
A backup is a complete copy of your database — customer names, addresses, order history, password hashes. Where it lands matters less than whether anyone there can read it.
UpdraftPlus offers database encryption as a paid feature, applied to the database archive.
Must-Have Backup encrypts every chunk with XChaCha20-Poly1305 before it leaves the server — files as well as database — and it was on by default throughout this test; you can see “On · encrypted” on the overview screen above. It also offers an envelope mode, where the site holds only a public key. In that mode the server can encrypt new backups but cannot decrypt anything, so an attacker who owns your WordPress install still cannot read your backup history. The private key lives with you.
That is also why the Recovery Kit exists: a standalone tool that can read and restore your backups without a working WordPress, which is precisely the situation you are in when you need it most. Keep a current one — after the 0.3.0 update the older kits cannot read the newer compressed backups.
Migration
Both plugins move sites, and both do it well enough that this is not a deciding factor for most people.
UpdraftPlus has a mature Migrate / Clone tab, a long track record, and the option of a paid clone service. It is probably the most widely used WordPress migration path there is.
Must-Have Backup builds a migration bundle — installer.php plus one archive.zip — from any moment in time, not just from the latest backup, with serialized-aware URL rewriting handled automatically. Two files to upload instead of thousands of loose files over FTP. Being able to migrate from a moment rather than from a backup is the same time-machine idea applied to moving house: you can promote yesterday-at-noon onto a fresh server.
Where UpdraftPlus is genuinely strong
- Ubiquity. Millions of installs, a decade of edge cases found and fixed, and every host’s support team has seen it. That is worth real money when something goes wrong at 2am.
- Self-contained archives. A backup set is a set of zips. You can download them, keep them anywhere, and unpack them by hand without the plugin. That is a genuinely reassuring property.
- It just works out of the box. Install, click Backup Now, done — as our test showed, no configuration needed.
- Migration. Its clone and migrate tooling is mature and widely used.
- More remote storage providers. Backblaze, pCloud, Google Cloud, DreamObjects and email delivery are all there. We do not match that list.
- Component-level restore. Bringing back only the themes, or only the database, from a set is a genuinely handy way to fix one broken thing.
Which one should you use?
Choose UpdraftPlus if your site is small or changes rarely, if you want backup files you can unzip by hand without any plugin involved, or if a daily restore point is genuinely enough for what your site does.
Choose Must-Have Backup if losing an hour would mean reconstructing orders from payment-processor emails, if your site is large enough that re-uploading it every night is a real cost, or if you want the restore point to be a moment you choose rather than a moment a schedule happened to fire.
For a brochure site, the 486 MB does not matter. For a shop, it is the difference between backing up once a day and backing up continuously. If you are still weighing the broader options — host backups, manual copies, scheduled plugins — we compared all four in this guide to WordPress backup methods.
Frequently asked questions
Is Must-Have Backup a good UpdraftPlus alternative?
For sites that change frequently, yes. Both back up reliably; the difference we measured is what a repeat backup costs — 486.5 MB with UpdraftPlus against 3.74 MB with Must-Have Backup on the same unchanged site — and whether you can restore to an arbitrary moment rather than to a scheduled one.
Does UpdraftPlus do incremental backups?
It offers an incremental option for adding changed files to an existing backup set. In our test we compared standard full backups on both sides, because that is what each plugin does when you press its main backup button without configuring anything.
How much disk does hourly backup need?
It depends entirely on whether your plugin re-stores unchanged content. On our 486 MB test site, hourly full backups would write about 11.7 GB per day. Storing only what changed brought the same repeat backup down to 3.74 MB.
Does Must-Have Backup encrypt backups?
Yes — every chunk, files and database alike, with XChaCha20-Poly1305 before it leaves your server, and it is on by default. There is also an envelope mode in which the site holds only a public key, so the server can create new encrypted backups but cannot read any of them back.
Can I restore just one table or folder?
Both plugins can, in different ways. UpdraftPlus restores selected components of a backup set — database, plugins, themes, uploads. Must-Have Backup goes to a different axis: under Advanced on the restore screen you can take different moments for specific tables or folders, so the orders table can come from 14:32 while the rest of the site stays where it is.
Can I run both plugins at once?
Technically yes — we did, for this test. In practice there is little reason to, and it has a funny side effect: whichever one runs second will back up the other one’s archives, which is exactly what inflated our first-run figure.
The verdict
UpdraftPlus earned its position. It backed up a real WooCommerce site in forty seconds with no configuration, produced archives anyone can unzip, and did not put a foot wrong. If your site is small or slow-moving, that is a complete answer and you should stop reading.
But it stored the same 486 MB twice for two identical backups, because a backup set has no memory of the one before it. That is the constraint that forces every scheduled backup plugin into the same compromise: back up less often, and accept a bigger gap between your last good copy and the moment you needed it.
Must-Have Backup stored 3.74 MB for the same repeat backup, in 14 seconds. Removing that cost is what makes it practical to record continuously instead — and that is what turns “restore yesterday’s backup” into “restore to 14:32”.
Try it on your own site and measure the second backup, not the first. That is where the two models part company.
Tested 17 August 2026 on showcase.swte.ltd: WordPress 7.0.4, PHP 8.3, WooCommerce 11.0, UpdraftPlus 2.26.6.26, Must-Have Backup 0.3.0. Two consecutive full backups per plugin, driven from WP-CLI, with each plugin’s storage directory measured in bytes before and after every run. No run was discarded.
