· The BackupRidge team
The worst part of switching backup plugins is that your old backups don’t come with you. Every plugin in this category writes its own format, so the day you switch, years of perfectly good backups turn into files nothing else can open — and the plugin you’re leaving becomes the thing you have to keep installed to read them.
As of 1.42.0, BackupRidge imports .wpress files — the export format used by All-in-One WP Migration — directly. Upload the file on the Restore page, and BackupRidge restores it like one of its own backups: database, plugins, themes, uploads, with your table prefix and URLs rewritten for the destination site. It’s free, and there is no file size cap.
About the 512 MB thing
If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance it’s because you have a .wpress file larger than 512 MB. All-in-One WP Migration’s free importer stops at that size; importing your own export file beyond it requires their Unlimited extension, which costs about $69. It is the single most complained-about paywall in the WordPress backup category — their one-star review column is largely people who discovered it mid-migration, standing next to an export file they couldn’t open.
To be fair to ServMask: selling extensions is a legitimate business, and All-in-One WP Migration is genuinely good at what it does. We just made a different call. Receiving a site migration has been free in BackupRidge from the start, and importing a .wpress file is the same feature wearing a different file extension. Putting a size limit on it would have meant inventing one — the format doesn’t have one, and neither does our restore pipeline.
So: no cap. The honest constraint that remains is your server itself — the disk still has to hold the extracted site, and PHP still gets a say. Those are real limits. We didn’t add an artificial one on top.
What actually happens when you import
A .wpress file is not a ZIP — it’s a custom sequential container. BackupRidge reads it natively and streams it: entries are validated and extracted as the file is read, with no convert-to-ZIP step and no second copy of your site on disk. If you’ve read anything else we’ve written, you know why: BackupRidge is built for sites on cheap hosting, where “needs 2× the site’s size in free disk” is the difference between working and not.
The import pipeline is the same one our own restores use, which means a .wpress import gets the whole safety apparatus, not a side door:
- A safety snapshot first. Before the import touches your site, BackupRidge takes a snapshot of what’s there — so if the imported site isn’t what you expected, rolling back to the moment before the import is one click. Importing a stranger’s archive into a live site should be reversible. Now it is.
- Your table prefix, not theirs. Recent All-in-One WP Migration exports don’t even contain a real table prefix — they contain a placeholder the importer is expected to substitute. BackupRidge substitutes your destination prefix, whatever the source was.
- URLs and filesystem paths rewritten. The database is rewritten for the destination site’s URL and its filesystem paths — serialization-safe, so widgets and plugin settings survive. Absolute paths from the source server (the kind that lurk in
upload_pathand plugin caches and quietly break media libraries after a naive migration) are remapped too. - Hostile-input treatment. An archive you found in a bucket somewhere is attacker-controllable input, and the reader treats it that way: entry paths are clamped against traversal,
wp-config.phpand the plugin’s own directory are never overwritten, and declared sizes are checked against the actual file.
Multi-gigabyte file but a host with an 8 MB upload limit? The Restore page upload is chunked, so the browser upload works regardless of PHP’s limits. You can also drop the file into the backup directory over FTP/SFTP — BackupRidge’s backup discovery recognizes single-file .wpress archives — or, on Pro, run the import from WP-CLI.
What it won’t do (yet)
Three honest limitations in this first version:
- Password-encrypted exports are rejected, with a message saying exactly that. All-in-One WP Migration 7.7+ can encrypt exports; if yours is encrypted, export it again without a password (or decrypt it with their tool) first.
- Multisite exports are rejected. Single-site only for now.
- The source site’s plugins come along. A
.wpressfile contains the source site’s entire plugin and theme set — including All-in-One WP Migration itself. That’s what “restoring the site” means, but it’s worth knowing: after an import, check your plugin list and deactivate what you don’t want. (Yes, you can delete All-in-One WP Migration. Your.wpressfile already did its job.)
If any of these bites you, tell us — “reject with a clear message” is v1 posture, not a verdict.
How we know it works
We didn’t test this against a format specification. We tested it against real export files produced by All-in-One WP Migration itself: our CI imports a real .wpress export end-to-end — upload, extract, database import, prefix remap, URL rewrite, site comes up — and separately proves the encrypted and multisite rejection paths do reject, on every change to the plugin.
And the standing offer applies here as everywhere: every BackupRidge release goes through a public backup → wipe → restore drill, and the result is published at backupridge.com/restore-log, pass or fail. Import is restore. Don’t trust us — check.
What this costs
Nothing. .wpress import is in the free plugin, size-unlimited, alongside free scheduled backups, one-click restore, pre-update snapshots with rollback, migration receive, and unlimited simultaneous storage destinations across local, FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, and Cloudflare R2. If BackupRidge free covers your needs, use it forever with our blessing.