One of UpdraftPlus’s features is to allow sending both backups and and backup reports via email. By sending a report by email, you can easily keep an eye on success and failure (handy tip: set up a filter in your email program to delete the successes, once you know that your backups are working after setup). The facility to send the backup itself by email is only useful if you’re sure that your backups are small enough to not be rejected by your email server. If they are small enough, then it’s a useful and cheap substitute for cloud storage.
One improvement that landed in the latest release (1.6.17) was the ability to specify multiple email addresses – if your organisation has several site administrators, then you can type in several, separating them with a coma.
We have some improvements planned in this area in future; particularly splitting up larger backup sets into several pieces, in order to allow backup by email of larger sites.
However, there is one feature which we plan to remove out of the free edition of UpdraftPlus, and into UpdraftPlus Premium. That is the ability to email your backup or reports to anyone other than the site owner (the one specified in Settings -> General in your WordPress dashboard). Why? Because, we want to encourage everyone who is running multiple sites on behalf of other people to upgrade to UpdraftPlus Premium. To be blunt, those are generally the folk who are making money from WordPress. People running their own websites, who are the sole admins on their blogs, are people whom we want to be able to make complete and easy backups with UpdraftPlus free. But folk who manage sites for their clients are those that are our main market – they help us to eat and live, and to have time to develop more features for UpdraftPlus, and to provide great support.
What does this mean for you? For most people, nothing. But, if you are managing UpdraftPlus backups for several people, and have set UpdraftPlus to email its backups and reports to someone other than the site owner, then in a future release – probably in approxiately 4-8 weeks time, after we’ve given people time to become aware of this change – you’ll need to either upgrade to UpdraftPlus Premium, or buy a separate add-on, to enable this function again. Keep watching this space for when we announce some money-off coupons to ease the upgrade path for the early birds!
