[wp-hackers] Incremental backup and restore

[Owen Winkler]

Chetan Kunte wrote:
> In a layman's terms, I was thinking of an idea: how about if the
> database can be backed-up and restored incrementally like "per year"
> or "per number of posts" in addition to the default option of a full
> backup and restore. I seriously think the "per year" or "per number of
> posts" concept is a good idea (provided of course the core contents of
> a database are not modified in between versions. Do you think I'm
> totally off?

The database backup utility is provided as a very simple method for 
users without command-line experience to create backups of their 
databases.  Anything more complex than "Push this button to backup these 
tables" should probably be addressed with a more advanced backup solution.

Seriously, if the size of a daily transfer is a problem, sign up for a 
/free/ Gmail account, and send the backups there.  Even uncompressed at 
3MB/day, a whole month of daily backups will use 93MB of space, which is 
less than 3.5% of my current total capacity at Gmail.  You could visit 
your Gmail account once every two years to clean out the old backups.

When something goes wrong, blow away the WordPress tables then grab the 
latest backup from Gmail and pump it through phpMyAdmin.  You're back 
online with minimal fuss.  Better yet, if the latest backup exhibits the 
same issues, you've likely got daily backups available going back to a 
time when things were still working.  And you don't have to worry about 
duplicate keys, since every backup is a complete backup.

With my hosting account my host provides an off-site FTP server for 
backups.  I asked skippy once about including support for transferring 
backups via FTP instead of email.  He wisely told me that any host that 
offers such "advanced" features is going to provide better tools than 
wp-db-backup for making use of them.  With cron and a couple lines of 
shell script, I can do much better.

The plugin is for folks who want simple and don't have the tools.  If 
you want better, consider upgrading your hosting to something that has 
shell access and use one of the many MySQL backup scripts laying around.

That's my thought.  Now skippy will probably make changes to the plugin.  ;)

Owen