About XCloner

XCloner is a website backup and restore plugin for WordPress. It was designed to be a very simple to use and to “just work”. Despite the apparent simplicity, the plugin is full-featured and very flexible. It is suitable for generating backups from websites big and small.

XCloner also performs well on a variety of hosting configurations and can be adapted to environments with abundant or limited resources (such as low-cost/shared hosting).

A standalone version for designed for PHP/MySQL websites and a native plugin for Joomla! are also available.

A brief history

XCloner first launched in 2010. It was developed in Romania by Ovi Liuta while he was attending university. Ovi continued to develop and freely-support XCLoner for the next decade (long after graduation!).

Between 2010 and 2020, Ovi released XCloner versions for 3 platforms:

  • WordPress
  • Joomla
  • LAMP (standalone PHP version)

In 2017, Ovi re-wrote the WordPress plugin and integrated a number of popular cloud-storage services to support offsite backups.

In total, XCloner for WordPress has been downloaded over one million times. Together, the Joomla and standalone versions have had similar success.

In 2020, Ovi agreed to sell XCloner to Watchful.net — the website update and maintenance service — to allow more time for family and work commitments. Ovi remains an important part of the XCloner team at Watchful and is actively involved in ongoing XCloner development.