Exclude Image Thumbnails From UpdraftPlus Backups

I found the code in your plugin via a tip in the #sustainability channel of WP Slack, so I tested it on a website that wasn't able to do a full backup for over a year now (due to a bad host). By filtering the thumbnails out, I was finally successful in making a full backup again. For sustainability this should actually be an option in UpdraftPlus. Thank you for saving time and disk space!

I was attempting to reduce my sites backup sizes, to ease day to day administration, and from a sustainability perspective. All data transfers and hot storage uses energy - there is a carbon footprint to those backups. Excluding themes and plugins that I might as well get from WordPress.org in a rare restore situation, helped a lot. But those many WordPress image variants were a real eyesore. Even with a lean theme, there is at least 6 different variants/thumbnails of each image. Exclude Image Thumbnails From UpdraftPlus Backups did away with those images unnecessary in the backup, making it so much smaller, faster to backup and friendlier to the enviroment. Bonus tip: I chose to exclude all webp images from the backup as well. Those are in my case generated from the original jpg or png images, for even speedier load times. I would be able to re-generate those easily if restoring my site. Obviously you shouldn't exclude webp if you upload these manually to the media library... Highly recommended.

This is a great plugin. I always had Updraft complaining about resources, and lots of backups that failed partly or completely. Now it runs smoothly and without errors. The feaure this plugin adds to Updraft should be a standard feature of Updraft itself. It's a must have, simply as that. I was considering to stop using Updraft, although I use it on dozens of sites. But now I can continue using it. Thanks to this litle gem!

Literally a miracle. Was next to impossible to reliably create backups for one of my sites due to so many images. This plugin makes using Updraft possible. THANK YOU!

Didn't try to restore and recreate thumbnails but for now I'm happy with the space savings. Thanks!

Saves Time! Saves Space! Thanks!

Hello, Thanks to this plugin, I now have a backup lighter and thus quicker to do! I now use a version I modified on my own to exclude also cropped thumbnails and webp images BUT keep "thumbnails like named" files inside plugins and themes (just to be sure, as basically they can be original files and not a thumbnail version of on other file). Combined with Dynamic Image Resizer (but a "modified and extended" plugin version) I got my winning duet when restoring a site. Great work.

Thumbnails are hardlinked in worpress content (pages, posts and so on). If you make a restore on a blank wordpress from a backupset made with this plugin the thumbnails are not going to be requested and created by the code. You have to trigger the reconstruction with one of the free plugins that do that. Great plugin!

I have been using your plugin for so long and never left a review. Thanks for this, changes my image-heavy backups of a couple of gigs to much less. Thanks again.

Congrats!