Most backup failures are silent: the job stopped running weeks ago and nobody noticed. Backup plugins grade themselves. BackupBeacon is the independent watchdog that does not.
How it works
- Add each backup destination (UpdraftPlus to Drive, database dumps to S3, your host’s nightly snapshots) with a freshness limit in hours.
- Point your backup job at the token-authenticated ping endpoint:
POST /wp-json/backupbeacon/v1/ping/<destination-id>?token=.... Every successful backup pings; the token is rotatable and pings are rate-bounded. - BackupBeacon evaluates every destination hourly (WP-Cron): fresh, stale (past its limit), or silent (never recorded, or a clock-skewed future timestamp). Backdated recordings are refused.
- When a destination turns stale or silent, the site admin gets an email and a persistent admin notice – once per incident, not once per cron tick. A dashboard widget rolls every destination into one ALARM/OK beacon, and the event log records when each destination went stale and when it recovered.
No account, no external service, no per-site fees. Your backup jobs ping your own site; the watchdog runs where the backups matter.
Optional premium plans unlock faster checks (15-minute cadence), more alert channels (Slack/Discord/webhook), escalation and maintenance windows, per-destination alert routing, a status API, multisite and white-label agency tooling. Upgrades happen inside your dashboard – no reinstall, no license-key copying – and every feature you use today stays free forever.
What it is not: BackupBeacon does not make backups. It is the alarm for the tools that do.
Screenshots
The BackupBeacon dashboard: every destination rolled into one ALARM/OK beacon, with per-destination freshness state.
Destination setup: token-authenticated ping endpoint with rotatable token and freshness limit in hours.