WP Twin is being sold and praised as ultimate tool for cloning WordPress sites and if your solely goal is to clone WP blogs WP Twin is OK. But cloning blogs is only part of the equation because after you’ve cloned your website you need to backup it regularly to avoid pesky interruptions and be able to restore in case if something goes wrong. WP Twin can do all that, but there is much better tool available on the market that beats WP Twin in every aspect.  The tool am talking about is BackupBuddy. On the surface Backup Buddy and WP Twin look somewhat similar – they both do backup, restore and cloning (migration) but if you look closer you’ll see that BackupBuddy is much more flexible and mature solution.

Below you’ll find description of most significant differences from the user perspective between WP Twin and Backup Buddy, if you want to see detailed feature by feature comparison between the two click here. If you want to see why BackupBuddy is considered the best WordPress backup plugin check out BackupBuddy review here.

WordPress Backup

With WP Twin you can save backup file to the same server or download it to your computer. By default you can only do manual backup which is not that convenient if you have a lot of other things to do. If you want to backup your blog automatically using WP Twin you have to purchase another script from them for $47.

With Backup Buddy you can perform automatic backups on the schedule that you define – every hour, every day, every week… and then send those backup files to secure remote destination like Amazon S3, DropBox, Rackspace Cloud, FTP/FTPS this way you can restore your blog even if you lose access to your server. This happened to me when my hosting account got permanently suspended for “excessive resource usage” and I wasn’t able to access backup files stored on my server.

WordPress Restore

In case if blog get hacked, infected with malware or you messed something up you could restore your blog from backup file but considering that WP Twin only supports manual backups (unless you paid $47 for automatic backups) you may not have recent backup file (unless you manually backup your blog every day) so you would have to restore to the version that is several days old or a week old…

With BackupBuddy if you have enabled scheduled remote backups script will backup your blog as often as you want, you could backup every hour if you feel a need, this way in case something happens you would have backup copy of your blog that is hour old and don’t lose any data.

WordPress Migrating – Cloning

With WP Twin when migrating your website to a new domain you have to install WordPress there first and only then script will import your database and all the files. This seems like extra work to me and can consume valuable time if you don’t have 1 click WordPress installers like Fantastico on your hosting panel. Other than that cloning WordPress blogs with WP Twin is fast and easy.

When migrating blog using Backup Buddy you don’t have to install WordPress on the destination server it will be created automatically with all your files and settings.

Feature by Feature Comparison

WP Twin vs Backup Buddy

Conclusion

If your primary goal is to clone WordPress sites and you need simplicity without advanced features then WP Twin will do the job. But if you’re looking for complete solution for WordPress backups that has all the bells and whistles then BackupBuddy is the right tool for you.