UpdraftPlus 1.9.60 is in the process of being released, and should appear in your dashboard in the next day or two. As ever, it’s a recommended updated for everyone.

This release has a few interesting changes and improvements in it:

Changelog

• ‘Automatic backups’ in your dashboard are now no-longer time-limited by the details of your web-hosting setup.
  Automatic backups are a great feature, and unique to UpdraftPlus (Premium) – they cause a backup to be taken automatically before you update a plugin, theme or WordPress core from your dashboard, so that you have a backup in case the update ends up breaking your site (as WordPress SEO’s update did for lots of people yesterday…) – without having to think about it. Previously, this used a mechanism which was time-limited; and cheap/slow web hosts, or enormous sites, had trouble with it. We’ve now changed the mechanism so that these backups can resume and carry on until they finish. As a bonus, as part of this change, they’re now  prettier too.

• ‘Backup Now’ can now overcome broken WordPress schedulers. This is particularly useful for developers taking a one-time backup of a site (e.g. they are cloning it in order to rebuild it, etc.), and who don’t want to spend time on finding out why the scheduler is broken. As long as the UpdraftPlus settings page is open, the backup will be able to resume and carry on – there is now basic scheduling carried out on the browser, so you don’t need to rely on WordPress itself not being broken.
• Amazon S3 back-end now supports Frankfurt (‘EU Central 1’) and China regions (again). Amazon recently began requiring use of a new protocol to store data in the Frankfurt/China regions. UpdraftPlus now includes an all-new S3 storage back-end which supports this. This change is under-the-hood – you should not notice any difference, except these regions now being available.

There are many other small tweaks for convenience too; some of the more interesting ones are:

• Database backup files can now be handled when uncompressed – i.e., you can remove the gzip compression, and use the resulting file (useful for large backups on slow/limited hosting: pre-decompressing the file will reduce the processing time needed).
• Make sure that activity is recorded periodically when adding database tables to the final database backup (we found a site with over 7,500 tables (a default WordPress setup has around ten!) – which, with this tweak, works perfectly).
• Added a free/Premium comparison table to the free version. Find it in the ‘Add-ons’ tab on your UD settings page.
• Importer (part of UpdraftPlus Premium – for importing 3rd-party backups) can now import generic .sql, .sql.gz and .sql.bz2 files. It can also now import the latest BackupWordPress format databases.
• Updated translations in several languages (many thanks for our translators)

The full changelog will appear shortly at this link.

Once again – if you’ve not yet upgraded to our flagship product, UpdraftPlus Premium, which includes all features and 12 months of updates and personal support, then please do take a look. We believe it’s the best backup plugin in existence for WordPress in 2015,  as well as being the most downloaded (approaching 1.9 million in total now) and we’ve got many more plans for it.