Thank you, Mark (Les Fruts De Mer),  for reporting the bug!

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.

Features planned for 0.8

• plugin encryption using mycript
• per-site email notifications
• WordPressBackup option to check backup integrity after download (simulate a restore and check for errors). Since it has a pretty big load on the server (and the site doesn’t have it’s own server yet due to financial issues – around 1300$ / year at best) we’re considering the options:

1. check on-demand by users
2. check all backups (very high server load, unlikely we can get away with that until we move to our own server)
3. check all backups for users that donated
4. (1) + (3)
5. off-site checking of backups – automatically downloading all backups, checking them and updating the result on the main site

We’re also thinking about putting the e-mail notifications on the off-side checking, if we go to that route

Any sugestions or opinions are welcome

Download the plugin from the WordPressBackup site.

And we apologize to all the php4-hosted users out there. Our plugin would choke on php 4. We missed a few things.

We’re sorry and we’ve learned our lesson…

If you’re hosted on php 4 go to home-page and click download plugin.

Should work smoothly now.

There are some people that have the blog set up to not run scripts from the plugins folder.

To fix this :

• create a file wpbdc.php and put the following code in it

<?php
if(is_file('wp-content/plugins/wordpressbackup/wpbdc.php'))
{
	define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
	if ( !isset($wp_did_header) ) {
		$wp_did_header = true;
	}
	require_once('wp-load.php');
	require_once('wp-content/plugins/wordpressbackup/wpbdc.php');
}
?>

• Next, upload it to your server, in your blog root (the folder where the wp-config.php is).

• Login to wordpressbackup.com, select your site and choose the ROOT FILE api method.

New feature: test option

You can now test if the blog settings on WordPressBackup are correct. Just click the button and wait a little bit.

New feature: pause option

You can nou pause the automatic backup for a site.

Go to Backup->Restore and you can lock/unlock a backup. A locked backup won’t be deleted to make room for new ones. This way you can select a backup and create a recovery point at a certain time.

Be careful, if you lock all your backups and there is no space left for new ones, the new ones will be dropped.

It’s 2 am here so we’re gonna go sleep for a while..

We wish you a great day tomorow!

Version 0.4 is required for the feature to work.

The plugin tries to simulate a connection to see if it works correctly. Here is an example of a “perfect reply”

plugin selftest perfection

(click to see a bigger image)

If you’re getting something else than {”test-reply”:”ok”} copy-paste the text in our contact form and send it to us with the subject ‘not working’. We’ll look into the matter.

Memory / Time Limits

For some of you that have alot of posts and/or comments the backup script would stop in the middle of the script. For others, it would error out when trying to set memory and time limits.

Plugin memory and time limits

These will default to “no” – means letting the server do it’s thing.

If you know what you’re doing and your script isn’t backing up (the @NO-END error in the backup log), try setting the time limit above 30 or/and memory limit above 6.  120 seconds and 12 megabytes should be enough for a medium-sized blog on a good (fast) host.

Simple!

Database backup options for WordPressBackup

Use the contact form to send me an e-mail if you want an account.