Michael De Wildt

WordPress Backup to Dropbox has a BRAND NEW WEBSITE! Check it out – http://wpb2d.com

Welcome to WordPress Backup to Dropbox! A plugin for WordPress that automatically creates a backup your blog and uploads it to Dropbox.

It has been created to give you piece of mind that your blog is backed up on a regular basis. Just choose a day, time and how often you wish yor backup to be performed and kick back and wait for a copy of your websites files and a SQL dump of its database to be dropped in your Dropbox! I have tried to keep this plugin as simple as possible, meaning that you can upload, install and setup you backup cycle in few minutes!

Settings

The Backup to Dropbox settings page is located under the WordPress settings menu. Within this page you can set the following:

• ‘Locally store backup in this folder’ – This is where you want the SQL dump to be stored on your WordPress server.
• ‘Store backup in this folder within Dropbox’ – This is where the backup is to be stored within your Dropbox.
• ‘Day and Time’ – Select the day and time that you wish your backup to be performed. Remember that someone will need to access a page on your site in order to kick off the backup, and that the user is not affected by this process at all.
• ‘Frequency’ – Select how often you would like your backup to be performed.

Security

The plugin uses OAuth so your Dropbox account details are not stored for the plugin to gain access.

Once installed, the authorization process is performed in three easy steps:

1. The plugin will ask you to authorize the plugin with Dropbox.
2. A new window open where you will be asked to authenticate and confirm whether you would like to give this plugin access to your Dropbox.
3. Once you have granted access to the plugin, return to your WordPress browser window and click continue to setup your backup.

Errors and Warnings

During the backup process the plugin may experience problems that will be raised as an error or a warning depending on its severity.

A warning will be raised if your PHP installation is running in safe mode, if you get this warning please read my blog post on dealing with this.

If the backup encounters a file that is larger then what can be safely handeld within the memory limit of your PHP instation, or the file fails to upload to Dropbox it will be skipped and a warning will be raised.

The plugin attempts to recover from an error that may occur where the backup process goes away for an unknown reason. In this case the backup will be restarted from where it left off. Unfortunately, at this time, it cannot recover from any other errors, however a message should be displayed informing you of the reason for failure.

Below is an example of a backup that encountered a timeout warning when uploading a file to Dropbox, the plugin attempted to upload it three times and failed so the file was skipped. Some time after the warning the backup process went away, most likely because the host killed it, so the monitor started a new backup to continue where the other failed.

Excluding Files and Directories

To excluded files and directories from your backup all you have to do is check which files yo do not want to be backed up and the plugin wil take care of the rest.

In the image above the user has chosen to exclude the images directory and two files within the css directory. As you can see, when the contents of a directory ar partially included, the checkbox is marked as with a circle.

Note: Unfortunately this widget is not available for Internet Explorer 7 users. Please update your browser to use it.

Minimum Requirements

1. PHP 5.2 or higher
2. WordPress 3.0 or higher
3. A Dropbox account

Download

Latest version: wordpress-backup-to-dropbox.zip

Issues

If you notice any bugs or want to request a feature please do so on the GitHub issue tracker or the WordPress forum for the plugin.