Michael De Wildt

RSS

WordPress Backup to Dropbox 1.5

15 May

Not only does have WPB2D a new logo, I have been working tirelessly to increase the performance of the plugin so it will work on more and more shared hosts out there.

New logo

I was recently, politely, told by an Automattic employee at WordCamp Melbourne that my old logo was infringing on their trademark. So I decided to launch a contest on 99designs, where after a tough decision I chose simPAL’s logo. What do you think?

Better storage structure

UPDATE: 16th May 2013 – I have just released version 1.5.1 to fix a few teething problems with the updated storage structure

In order to increase the performance of the plugin I decide to move all the plugin options out of the wp_options table and into their own table. This will reduce and read write contention on the wp_options table as well as fix issues where the maximum MySQL data packet was being reached.

This change is completely under the hood so you should only notice is a slightly faster backup and exclude files widget!

Better security

On servers that do not have their htaccess files set up correctly there is a chance that an internet user can guess the route of your SQL dump or zip archive and download it whilst a backup is in progress. While the odds of this happening is very rare I have decided to be safe and increase the security of this data.

Now when a SQL dump or Zip archive is created it is postfixed with a SHA1 secret hash that will make it impossible to be downloaded on less then secure servers. This hash will be removed from the file that is stored in Dropbox and, as usual, the file is removed the server once the backup is compete.

Resuming chunked uploads

All chunked uploads are now tracked and resumed if the backup process goes away. This addresses one of the biggest problems that users are reporting, the fact that some large files don’t make it to Dropbox or that the backup stalls at, say, 99%.

When the backup encounters a file over 10MB it will use Dropbox’s chunked upload feature and log the status of the upload in the backup log. In my testing I managed to backup a 500MB file using only 64MB of memory on a budget shared host.

Other bug fixes and tweaks

Fix issue #127: in_array() warning on multisite setups
Fix a few E_NOTICES, sorry guys I did not realise these were suppressed by WordPress
Fix copy on subscriptions page
Added style to some buttons
Added the ability to choose to receive emails on success of failure to the email extension

What’s next?

The plugin is going from strength to strength and I am in the process of re-structuring in a way that I can dedicate more time to support it and my users. So, hopefully in the coming months I will have some exciting news on this front.

Install it today.

Checkout the website.

20 Comments

Posted in WordPress Backup to Dropbox

WordPress Backup to Dropbox 1.4.5

27 Mar

This release is a small release with a few minor features and some bug fixes that have been plaguing many users.

New Features

Added support for multi site

Although the plugin has always worked with a network setup it now officially supports multisite. The backup menu will now be located in the network admin section and, as in the past, it will backup all of the sites in your network as well as the database.

Added support for running WordPress in its own directory.

WordPress has a feature where you can put it in a sub directory of your www root. The plugin will now backup the contents of your ‘home’ and ‘siteurl’ locations.

Added support for an alternate WP_CONTENT_DIR

You can also define your own WP_CONTENT_DIR that, in the past, was not seen by the plugin. Now the plugin wil backup both the WP_CONTENT_DIR and the ABSPATH separately combining them into a single backup.

Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue where windows servers where uploading with incorrect slashes

With the Dropbox API update Windows users have been experiencing directory separator issues. This was due to a unix backslash being used instead of a cross platform friendly method.

Fixed an issue where directories where being marked as partial when they had no excluded files

Dropbox has a list of files that it will not accept and they form an ignore list. Originally excluded and ignored files where deemed to be the same and where causing the incorrect partial markings, this has now been fixed.

Fixed a memory leak in the exclude file widget

I finally got to the bottom of the memory limit exceeded problems for some users in the exclude widget! This was a doozy but it came down to how PHP serialised SplFileInfo class to a string.Doing this is bad:

$files = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(new RecursiveDirectoryIterator('/some/path));
foreach ($files as $file)
    echo basename($file);

Doing this saved heaps of memory:

$files = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(new RecursiveDirectoryIterator('/some/path));
foreach ($files as $file)
    echo basename($file->getPathname());

Again, thanks everyone for taking the time to post issues and feedback. Without your support this plugin will not be where it is today and continue to grow to be the most reliable backup solution for WordPress.

Comments Off

Posted in Uncategorized, WordPress Backup to Dropbox

Introducing WPB2D Simple Restore

13 Feb

Restore your WordPress blog in five simple steps.

Yep, its that easy. As long has you have backed up your blog using the WordPress Backup to Dropbox zip extension you can restore your site in five steps without even installing WordPress.

Note: Pople who do not use the zip extension, never fear, you can still use the WPB2D simple restore, all you need to do is zip up your backup in a new folder within the app folder.

For more information checkout the website: http://wpb2d.com/simple-restore

Oh, and there is a new release: WordPress Backup to Dropbox 1.4.4

This announcement comes with a new version of WPB2D that fixes these issues:

1. It will now attempt to set the memory limit WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT and have a better go at setting the time limit

This is because wont allow the setting to be set to unlimited, but if they fully support WordPress they will allow the wp max limit. In addition to this the plugin will have a better attempt at setting the time limit, starting at 300 seconds (the apache TimeOut directive) and working backwards.

2. Added .dropbox to the ignored files list as Dropbox does not accept it

3. Added retry logic for normal uploads that receive errors

There have been elevated reports of 500 internal server errors in the response from Dropbox. So, in order to be more robust, the plugin now retries 3 times to upload a file when it receives an error.

4. Updated the Dropbox API lib that includes retries for chunked uploads

There has been some great work done by Ben on the Dropbox PHP API that the plugin uses, this is now up-to-date and has a feature that will resume chunked uploads when a 400 error is received.

5. Fixed a minor potential XSS issue when viewing the backup log

Firstly thanks Mahadev Subedi (@blinkms) for the heads up! If a file managed to get onto your sever with javascript in the filename, yes filename, the backup log view was vulnerable to an XSS attack. Due to the fact that the attacker would actually have to compromise your server in order to pull off the XSS, the odds of someone exploiting the hole is slim to none. Either way, thanks Mahadev for pointing out the issue.