WordPressBackup

Plugin 0.8 – Encryption

We’re happy to announce that encryption has been implemented. Download the WordPress Automated Backup Plugin from here or wait until it’s updated on

Pros

• your data is safe from prying eyes
• only you have access to it
• encryption is using a widely-used algorithm: rijndael-256 also known as AES (read about it on wikipedia)
• Passwords: 2 “paswords” – 32-character long each
• decryption function built-in, if you keep the plugin somewhere you easily get it from (on the same cd with the backups, perhaps?)

Cons

• if you loose or forget the passwords, bye-bye data. So, pretty please, don`t! We don’t receive it.
• they are 8 to 15 times larger in size than a normal backup, even archived
• we won’t be able to check backups automatically
• if you move your blog to another host or the current one disables php encryption you won’t be able to decrypt them (we’ll have a page for that, in the future).

How to decrypt

1. install the WordPress Automatic Backup plugin with version > 0.7
2. go to the wpBackup -> Encryption page
3. set up the two passwords and enable encryption
4. the wpBackup -> Decryption page will appear; open it
5. get the backup (.zip file) from the site or from your e-mail or drive
6. extract the backup.sql file from it
7. on the Decryption page upload the backup.sql file
8. you’ll download the unencrypted file
9. as with the unencrypted files – use it in phpMyAdmin and import data or in whatever software you like
10. relax

We strongly recommend looking at the SelfTest plugin page to see if the decryption test is ok. And then we strongly recommend checking the first encrypted backup! Download it and unencrypt it. If it looks out of place then it means your host has non-default settings.

Ask them if “the mCrypt function in php is enabled” and send us the reply. Since there are so many configurations possible we took the most widely-used as a starting point.

In a future version we will add an option to set your own encryption / decryption algorithms.

Posted in Development · January 21st, 2009 · Comments (0)