And my love for blogVault continues….
Recently, I wrote a post about how we’re using blogVault(aff) to migrate, restore, and backup our websites.
I also included some honest feedback about some things that are lacking and things that could be improved such as better integration with Dropbox and a better user interface on their website.
Soon after I wrote that post, I noticed an error on all our sites: “The plugin blogvault/blogvault.php
I contacted blogVault via their contact form on their website to find out what the problem was.
Two seconds later, they saw that I was logged into the blogVault Dashboard and started chatting with me. A little stalker-ish, but in a good way. They helped me figure out that the problem was related to automatic updates in InfiiteWP(IWP), a platform we use for upgrading multiple WordPress sites.
They emailed me a few days later saying the problem connected to IWP was fixed! I was able to re-activate all the plugins with one click in IWP, and everything went back to normal.
And, while we were chatting, the blogVault support staff mentioned that he saw our post about our feature requests via Twitter and wanted to respond to all of them!
I was blown away. They are so on the ball with taking their customers seriously and responding to them so personally.
Here are the takeaways from our chat:
blogVault Plugin for WordPress
My Feedback: The plugin that connects a site to blogVault has not really been working for me so I need to add it manually to each site.
blogVault’s Response: We are fixing the auto-install
Dashboard Interface
My Feedback: I wish there was a better dashboard for seeing all the sites I’m backing up. Right now, you can either search or scroll, scroll, scroll to see more. I actually love the way IWP displays the list of sites you are managing.
My Feedback: blogVault saves all your backups on their server. I would love to be able to save backups automatically to our own remote server. Right now, only Dropbox is available for these extra backups, and these backups can only be done manually one site at a time. Also, I wish I could select which folder I want the backup to go to in Dropbox. Currently, blogVault decides that it goes into a generic blogVault folder.
blogVault’s Response: The automatic saving to Dropbox is something which we are not very sure about though. we could end up filling up the dropbox space in no time we store all the data on our own 2 separate servers further we then backup all the data onto Amazon S3 which is completely independent of our data center. In terms of specifying a folder, we will consider adding that Thanks. I have made a note. Should not be a big feature, so will try and squeeze it in some downtime. Regarding an auto-backup to your own Amazon S3 account, we plan on doing that.
Add file sizes in Skipped Files List
My Feedback: It would be really helpful if the skipped files list showed the size of each of the files individually.
blogVault’s Response: We will improve that
Delete Error Logs from blogVault Dashboard
My Feedback: Don’t know if it’s possible, but would be cool if there was a way to delete error logs and other skipped files directly from the blogVault dashboard.
blogVault’s Response: We cannot delete the log files etc because we don’t want to add the ability to modify the site in any way from blogVault that way backups will be completely independent of the original site Security wise this is something we would prefer.
In conclusion
When I told blogVault that I was impressed with their customer service – how they seem to respond instantly through email and chat, in a real, non-robot-y way, their response was “Thanks, but we’d rather customers not need support in the first place”. I get it. They’d like to improve their product so that everything works perfectly. But perfection takes a loooong time, and I’d rather use their backup platform, even if it isn’t 100% perfect, because it’s still way better than lots of other tools I’ve used over the years.
