My experience with this plugin

  • As a new WP user I found this plugin to be poorly supported. I then upgraded to a paid version for better support and I really do not seen much improvement. Save your money and don’t assume anything with this plugin. I bought another type of plugin and the support was excellent and was up and running and couldn’t live without it now. I intend to reup next year. I won’t be renewing my paid upgrade with Updraft.

    I see that Go Daddy, my hosting site, has blacklisted this free version of Updraft and says it is “Abandoned/Unsupported as the reason. They do not blacklist the paid version but I did try the free version out first and felt maybe if I had the paid version it would actually work. It did not without a lot of trial and error on my part with their poor support for this paid version. Their support is not very effective. No emailing just posting on the forum every three days or so and no way to really zero in on the issue. It is like watching paint dry. I think they do this to get you to buy their other support products. I feel scammed.

    [ GoDaddy link redacted. The Updraft Plus plugin is not blocked or banned on GoDaddy. ]

    Also I suggest you look at the postings on the WP forums for this plugin and pay particular attention to how many are not really resolved.

    I chose Google Drive since I have 15GB for free storage. I also would have liked to be able to download the files and save to external hard drive which is not possible but it looks like you can download from Google Drive.

    The screen shots they provide for Google Drive backups are out of date and are not detailed enough, so do not assume the documentation is uptodate for this plugin. It looks good until you try it. If you need more support guess what? Yes you can buy more support from them. Is that a coincidence? You decide.

    Only after reading many of the forum postings with others having the same type of difficulty with Google Drive and just trying to guess in between the lines with all this did I get it to authenticate after two days! I think most newbies would have given up on that. It will now backup to GD but not the uploads. No error per se but just a warning there is a large file and it hangs is all. No way I have found to exclude the bigger files and tried to and it may not have that ability.

    I am out 70.00 now for UD and will write it off to learning how some of these plugin authors operate.

    I sell digital teaching resources online and have bigger files sizes due to flattening and am looking for a better backup and restore approach for WP. If you do know of any please message me.

    I had another of Mr. Anderson’s plugins and just deactivated it since I am not that impressed with their business approach to customers. I do find if you do support your products well that customers will come back to buy again with confidence.

    I noticed with all the other plugins I have if you click the “Details” you go to the WP site for the plugin to learn about the plugin and to access the WP forums for support. However with UD they do this differently. They link off of WP site to their .com site for all the links for this plugin. This is where they sell more support and upgrades. I think there should be at least one link to the WP forums from the plugin that gives more details about that particular plugin. All my other plugins do this.

    I have about 11 plugins and this one stands out for all the wrong reasons. I am very suspect of the reviews for this plugin. If you sort by the bottom 1 star reviews you get a whole different picture of the problems recently.

    • This topic was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by trillium2.
    • This topic was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by Jan Dembowski.
    • This topic was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by Jan Dembowski.
Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Plugin Author David Anderson

    (@davidanderson)

    Hi Deanne,

    My understanding is that the www.ads-software.com forum rules do not permit reviews of www.ads-software.com plugins which only touch upon the support arrangements for commercial plugins, so, it’s likely that this will soon be deleted. However, I will respond whilst it’s here.

    Firstly, you headline the review with “Go Daddy blacklisted the free version of this plugin”. This is untrue – see their list of blacklisted plugins here: https://fr.godaddy.com/help/blacklisted-plugins-8964 – which lists the antique Updraft plugin, and explicitly says “We do not blacklist UpdraftPlus”. In fact, UpdraftPlus is an official member of GoDaddy’s partner program, and regularly appears on their list of most-installed plugins (Google “UpdraftPlus GoDaddy top 100” – I’m not going to include every link as I think the www.ads-software.com forum will block links with too many URLs in).

    The rest of your post is a complaint that we do not support our plugins, and take 3 days to reply to any forums posts. This is contradicted by your actual experience.

    Your www.ads-software.com profile shows that you have opened 3 support threads in our free forum. Again, I won’t link every post to avoid getting blocked, but they’re all linked from your profile: https://www.ads-software.com/support/users/trillium2/topics/

    The first of these asked a question that is already addressed in the FAQs; but, nevertheless, one of our staff (who is actually paid a salary to answer the questions of free users, even when they ask questions already easily findable in the FAQs) answered it within 8 hours. That is this one: .

    You then followed up with a different question, which you also double posted as a new thread; he replied again same-day to both of them; that is this one: . That issue was identified as a failure to enter correct settings in your Google console, and caused Google (not UpraftPlus) to show you an error message. This issue is also in our FAQs, and all three of Google’s error message, our FAQ, and our same-day support rep’s reply identified the mistake clearly.

    You then opened another support request yesterday, at 5 p.m. on Sunday. We do not have any paid support staff working at this time. Nevertheless, our staff opened it at 9.07 a.m. Monday morning – i.e. within 7 minutes of our office opening.

    Concerning the support you received after purchasing the commercial version of UpdraftPlus, our records show that you made your purchase at 10 p.m. on Saturday evening. Though we do not have paid staff working at this time, one of our staff members was working overtime, and replied to you inside 2 hours. They identified your mistake in the configuration, and supplied a link to the FAQ, and also offered to fix it manually for you if you supplied login details.
    You then replied on Sunday when our staff were not present… but, logging in to the support system now, I can see that on Monday morning a member of staff has already replied, at 08:56 am.

    As such, it appears that every statement you have made in your review is untrue. You have never made a support request that took 3 days to get a reply to; on the contrary, every support posting you made had a reply inside 24 hours, notwithstanding the fact that this included postings on Sunday. The fact that we deploy paid staff to swiftly provide support even to users of the free plugin is a fact which anyone on the www.ads-software.com website can verify within a few clicks. The statements that we have deliberately constructed our business as an attempt to defraud you are completely false.

    David

    Moderator Jan Dembowski

    (@jdembowski)

    Forum Moderator and Brute Squad

    I’m not commenting on the substance of this review except to reply to this part.

    My understanding is that the www.ads-software.com forum rules do not permit reviews of www.ads-software.com plugins which only touch upon the support arrangements for commercial plugins, so, it’s likely that this will soon be deleted. However, I will respond whilst it’s here.

    Your understanding is incorrect and this review is not being deleted.

    When a plugin author has an upsell for a “pro” version of a plugin here then that makes these reviews legitimate and valid as a subject matter. Please stop saying otherwise, the review will remain.

    Plugin Author David Anderson

    (@davidanderson)

    Hi @jdembowski,

    Thanks for clarifying, no problem. Are you able to adjust the review title to something appropriate? The title’s the only thing visible for people who don’t click through, and the falsehood in it is somewhat harmful. (Far from being blacklisted by GoDaddy, a) we’re actually in their recommended plugins partner program, and b) GoDaddy explicitly state on their blacklist page that they’re talking about a different plugin than UpdraftPlus to help people not make that mistake – https://my.godaddy.com/help/blacklisted-plugins-8964).

    David

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by David Anderson. Reason: Put the URL in the proper place
    Moderator Jan Dembowski

    (@jdembowski)

    Forum Moderator and Brute Squad

    That I will do.

    @trillium2 the title is not accurate. When you visit that page they explicitly state that Updraft Plus is not black listed.

    View post on imgur.com

    The plugin they are discussing is this one.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/updraft/

    That one is not this plugin. That’s the original plugin by a different author that was abandoned 7 years ago and has nothing to do with your problem.

    Plugin Author David Anderson

    (@davidanderson)

    Thanks.

    I invite anyone else reading this review to look at @trillum2’s profile and the posts posted in our support channel, to verify whether or not it’s true that she *ever* had to wait 3 days for answers to support requests (which in my view would not be particularly unreasonable when you are using free software, even had it been true), and to see that she asked a question about purchasing the paid version late on Saturday evening (currently approx 36 hours ago – N.B. we are a UK-based business), and then posted this review about not getting timely support on the next day, Sunday.

    David

    Thread Starter trillium2

    (@trillium2)

    David the way you treat folks who have a problems with how you handle customer service is just sad. You dig yourself deeper with your responses. If you spent as much time helping the customers over attacking them you might have a better chance at holding onto them. Your responses did not cover all the problems and I hope the readers will look closely at all the points I made since he thinks he has some how slammed dunked all my points and discredited my experience. He has not. I have no allusions that I will change the way this author operates but I do hope it will make others pause and rethink this approach and look at the bigger picture with what is possible. I think this may have worked out in my favor since it made me look deeper at other options. I have Go Daddy and I see that they backup my site and have 30 backups of my site at all times including my large uploads which UD was hanging up on. I can also download directly from there to my external hard drive. They have a restore button and backup button. I had read other negative postings about this plugin after the fact and expected the attacks as he has done so this was not a shock and par the course. I do apologize for making the connection that the same name was the same company with Go Daddy but I stand by my experience otherwise.

    Well, that was a good read!

    I always read one star reviews rather than five star, as they tend to give a more complete view of a product/service (as long as you’re willing and able to read between the lines where necessary).

    The conclusions I draw from the above are:

    a) Trillium is a vexatious complainant
    b) David Anderson is quite good at handling complaints
    c) Updraft Plus is probably quite a good product and the support is probably excellent
    d) bonus point – Trillium needs to learn the difference between allusion and illusion

    Anyway, the reason for this comment (apart from the provision of a bit of moral support to someone who, based on his responses to other criticisms of this plugin, takes quite a lot of time to reply to people who often don’t really deserve it) is to note that I came looking for a backup plugin after repeatedly being shown a message from VaultPress in my WP dashboard. Having read this thread and done my own research, I now know that many of the large scale hosting services offer free, automatic backups as standard. Personally, I use Bluehost and they appear to backup everything every day!

    However, if I were going to use a backup plugin, it would now be Updraft Plus.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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