The Age of the Online Backup Plugin
The software plugin has become an essential feature of computing, especially over the web. A plugin is simply a software application that adds functionality to another software application. That other application must be built to accept plugins; if it does, you can then customize it as you like by creating or using the corresponding plugin. Web browsers are a very common example of software applications that use plugins. Vendors offer them to facilitate online searches, scan for viruses or read different audio-visual formats: Adobe’s Flash Player and Apple’s Quicktime Player are well-known examples. In that case, doesn’t it make sense to have plugins to help with online backup?
Plugins are for Specific Tasks
A plugin is usually designed to do one thing well, rather than many things maybe not quite as well. The online backup plugin follows this rule. It’s designed to help you succeed with backup to the cloud from the particular application into which it’s installed. On the other hand, it isn’t designed to do universal backup of all the files and applications in all your computers. But instead of relying on a sticky note, your memory or a scheduled background action for the specific backups in question, a plugin takes action directly. The more popular the application to be backed up, the more chance you have of finding a suitable online backup plugin – and the more reason you have to use such a plugin.
The Most Popular Online Backup Plugin in the World
The online backup plugin that attracts the most attention at the moment is the one for WordPress, which is itself the most popular blogging system in use on the Web today (over 60 million websites use it). Blogs can contain a huge amount of content that is not easily replaceable. Yet Backup Technology, maker of a free online backup for WordPress plugin considers that only a small percentage of blog sites are backed up. There is also a large number of other free or paying online backup plugins that exist for WordPress, like BackupToDropbox that backs up an entire WordPress site to (you guessed) Dropbox.
WordPress Example – Are You Sure You Backed Up Everything?
An online backup plugin for WordPress may start by doing an initial complete backup of the WordPress site, and then regularly checking for any modified files. It should cover WordPress pages, posts, comments, settings, attachments, site themes and other plugins (for example, those used to do SEO optimization of the WordPress pages). In short, it’s designed to back up all the things you need to get your WordPress site up and running again elsewhere if your current web server crashes. That means much more than just the pages or blog posts content.
Other Online Backup Plugins
The same principles also apply to online backup plugins for other applications. The AdBackup solutions from Oodrive for instance offer plugins for business databases using the Oracle platform, Microsoft’s SQL Server (database), SharePoint (file-sharing) and Exchange (messaging) applications, IBM’s AS400 servers, and VMWare (virtualized computing). Virtualized environments can be excellent for optimizing an organization’s use of computing resources. Yet many users don’t understand that without further protection, their data may be exposed to even greater risk in a virtualized environment than in a non-virtualized one. An online backup plugin that takes care of backing up everything required to restart such an environment (server configurations, data, applications, user access profiles and so on) can be a life-saver if in-house virtualized servers fail.
