You can schedule backups with both versions of UpdraftPlus. You can also set a different backup schedule for files and the database.

With the free version you can schedule every 2, 4, 8 or 12 hours, daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly.

What you can’t do is specify the time of day when a backup is taken, this is a feature of UpdraftPlus Premium.

If you manage WordPress websites on behalf of clients, you might prefer to back up over night, when they’re not using the site or when server resources are high.

Upgrade to UpdraftPlus Premium if scheduling backups at specific times of the day or night is important to you, such as during off-peak hours when your client isn’t active on the site or when server resources are higher.

With the free version, you can choose how many file and database backups to retain.

What you can’t do is tell UpdraftPlus to retain less backups as those backups get older.

With Premium, you could tell UpdraftPlus to back up daily, but for backups older than one week, keep only one copy per week.

You could go further still.

Once backups reach one month old, you could tell UpdraftPlus to keep only one backup per month.

This will result in storing one backup every day for the last week, one backup a week for backups aged between a week and a month and then one backup a month being retained for backups older than a month.

Setting automated backup retention rules is a great way to save time (vs pruning backups manually) and server resources. It’s set and forget with UpdraftPlus Premium.

With the free version of UpdraftPlus, you can back up to:

• Google Drive
• Dropbox
• Amazon S3
• Rackspace Cloud Files
• FTP
• DreamObjects