Don’t Trust VaultPress to Back Up Your WordPress Site

UPDATE: I have another site that was using VaultPress, and I am no longer using that website, and on March 1, I got an email from VaultPress saying that it couldn’t connect to the site. I stopped using the site ten months ago.

I use VaultPress, via Jetpack, to back up my WordPress sites. I received an email this morning with the subject line:

[VaultPress] Warning! VaultPress is having problems backing up kirkville.com

The body of the email said:

Hello,

It seems like we haven’t generated any backup snapshots of your site kirkville.com/wordpress since Dec 19.

At VaultPress, our highest priority is to keep your content safely backed up at all times, and we’d like to make sure everything is in order. Thank you for replying to this message so that we can start looking into this issue.

Dec 19.

That’s nearly two months ago. Why are you just telling me this now?

I went to the VaultPress dashboard on my site, and saw this:

Vaultpress sucks

175 times in the past 4 weeks. Seriously.

One of the most important things is computer security is telling you when something doesn’t work. It’s no use having a backup routine if backups aren’t happening.

This is an egregious failure in VaultPress’s service. Fortunately, I have never needed to restore my site from a VaultPress backup, but I know I cannot trust it now. I am using VaultPress as part of the Jetpack Pro subscription, and the next time that subscription comes up for renewal, I will stop paying for the pro version. In the meantime, I’m going to check out the many WordPress plugins that back up the site and database. VaultPress cannot be trusted.