DadsFam Backups

Changelog

1.15.3

• Fixed: a backup converted from UpdraftPlus showed “0 DB rows” in the list, which read as an empty database. Its database is there; UpdraftPlus does not record how many rows it holds, so the count is now left out instead, and the row says it was converted from UpdraftPlus.
• Fixed: an UpdraftPlus backup that had already been converted still offered “Convert”, and a second click made another full-size copy. It now shows “Converted”, and converting the same backup twice is refused. Delete the converted copy if you ever want to convert it again.

1.15.2

• Fixed: on a laptop-height screen the restore window could run off the top and bottom of the screen, hiding its title and the Restore and Cancel buttons. Windows now scroll when they are taller than the screen, and their buttons stay in view while you scroll. The same applies to the window for looking inside a backup.

1.15.1

• Fixed: off-site copies now count database-only backups separately from full backups, as this server already does. With a database-only schedule running more often than full backups, the off-site “keep this many” setting could remove the only full backup from Google Drive or OneDrive.
• The readme now lists the outside services this plugin talks to in its own “External services” section.
• For developers: one retention planner now decides what to remove, here and off-site, and exposes the dadsfam_backups_retention_plan filter.

1.15.0

• New: move a site by link. On the old site, Backups → “Move this site” creates a transfer link for any backup (it works for 6 hours to 7 days, and can be switched off at any time). On the new site, paste it under “Copy a backup from another site” and the backup is copied straight across, server to server, in pieces that carry on if the page is closed or the connection drops. Then click “Clone here” as usual. No downloading to your computer, no uploading, no upload size limits.
• New: look inside a backup. The folder icon next to each backup opens it folder by folder. Download any single file, or put back just one file or folder instead of restoring the whole site. By default only missing files are put back; you can choose to replace the current versions too, and either way it can be undone for 24 hours. The same files a full restore protects (server settings files, wp-config.php and this plugin) are never overwritten this way.
• New: convert UpdraftPlus backups. UpdraftPlus backups in wp-content/updraft are listed on the Backups tab with a Convert button that turns each one into a normal DadsFam backup — restore it, browse it, or move it to another site. The UpdraftPlus files are never changed or deleted.
• For AI assistants: a new ability to look inside a backup. Putting files back and restoring stay with the person.

1.14.0

• New: “What will I lose?” before every restore. Restoring the database puts it back exactly as it was when the backup was made, so anything added since — orders, posts, comments, customer accounts, uploads — disappears. Nothing warned you. The restore window now counts them before you press the button (“Since this backup was made (3 days ago): 12 orders, 2 pages and 40 comments. Restoring the database removes them.”), and for backups made from this version on it also says which plugins, theme or WordPress version would change.
• New: a safety copy before every restore, and one-click undo. Unless you untick it, whatever the restore is about to replace is backed up first. If the restore turns out not to be what you wanted, a “Put things back” button on the Dashboard and Backups tab restores that safety copy. If there is not enough room on the server for the safety copy as well as the restore, it tells you before touching anything.
• New: pin a backup and give it a note. A pinned backup stays on your server until you unpin it: the “keep this many” limit skips it, and it is kept even when local copies are set to be deleted after uploading. A note labels it in the list, for example “Before the redesign”.
• New: extra database-only backups on their own schedule. Back up just the database daily (or weekly) at a different time from your full backups. Off until you switch it on in the Schedule tab.
• New: backups made by other backup plugins are spotted. If an old UpdraftPlus, All-in-One WP Migration, Duplicator or similar folder is sitting in your site, the Dashboard shows how big it is and offers to skip it, because otherwise every backup includes a copy of those backups. Nothing is deleted.
• New: “Are my backups private?” test. Nginx servers ignore the protection file in the backups folder. The plugin now checks for real and, if the folder can be reached from the internet, shows the exact rule to send your host.
• New: backup status in Site Health, the admin bar and a weekly email. Site Health warns when a backup is overdue, when backups are only on this server, or when the folder is not private. The admin bar dot (green, amber, red) is on for new installs and off for sites updating from an earlier version; switch it in Settings. The weekly “All good / Needs attention” email is off until you switch it on, and has a “Send me one now” button.
• Faster backups of photos and video. Files that are already compressed (JPEG, PNG, WebP, MP4, MP3, ZIP, PDF and similar) are stored as they are instead of being compressed again. The backup is still an ordinary zip and restores exactly as before.
• Changed: “keep this many backups” now counts database-only backups separately from full backups, so frequent database backups can never push your last full backup out. Pinned backups do not use up a place. This only ever keeps more backups than before, never fewer.
• Readme corrections. The FAQ said moving a site to a new domain or table prefix was a Pro feature; it has been part of this plugin all along. The Pro list no longer claims Google Drive and OneDrive, which have been free since 1.9.0.
• For AI assistants: new abilities to preview a restore, pin or note a backup, and check the backups folder is private. The settings ability accepts the new schedule and reminder settings.
• The plugin now ships a translation template in /languages.

1.13.2

• Fixed: asking an AI assistant how many backups were off-site could get the answer “none” when there were plenty. The Dashboard always showed the right number, because it checks your Google Drive or OneDrive when the page opens. The assistant’s storage check instead read a remembered list that is kept for fifteen minutes and cleared after every upload, and when that list had lapsed it answered zero. It now fetches the list from your destinations when the remembered one has lapsed, and if a destination cannot be reached it says the count is unknown and why, instead of saying zero.
• The same fix applies to the note shown after a backup is deleted from the server, which tells you how many copies are still safe off-site.

1.13.1

• Faster: the “Space on your server” figures are remembered for two minutes instead of being rebuilt on every Dashboard load, and cleared the moment a backup finishes, a clean-up runs, a backup is cancelled or deleted, or a restore or import completes — so they are never stale. “Check again” always reads the disk. Checking whether an unlisted archive is complete now reads only the archive’s central directory rather than validating every entry, which on a multi-gigabyte file was seconds of work for a yes/no answer.

1.13.0

• Fixed: “Clean up temp files” almost always reported 0 files / 0 B and looked broken. The button shared an hourly throttle with the automatic sweep, and the code meant to lift that throttle for a manual press cleared an option name left over from an old version — so it never did. If the automatic sweep had run in the past hour, the button returned before touching a single file. On top of that it only removed things older than a day, and only looked at the top level of the staging folder.
• Fixed: interrupted backups were invisible and never cleaned up. A backup that dies mid-archive leaves a zip with no sidecar. The list only shows archives that have one, so that zip — often gigabytes — appeared nowhere, was counted in no figure, and was never removed. It is now found, shown, and clearable.
• New: a “Space on your server” card on the Dashboard that tells you, before you press anything, exactly what this plugin has on the disk: your real backups (never touched), leftovers you can clear, and working files that belong to something running right now. “Show me exactly what is there” lists every item with what it is and how long ago it was last touched. The button says how much it will clear, and afterwards says exactly what it did.
• New: recovery instead of deletion. If clean-up finds a finished backup that had dropped off your list (its sidecar went missing), it puts the backup back rather than deleting it — the archive carries its own metadata, and that is used to rebuild the record.
• Housekeeping now covers everything the plugin can leave behind — backup working files, off-site staging copies, abandoned restore folders, half-finished imports and cloud downloads, and unexpected leftover folders — and protects anything in use by the running backup, a queued upload, a live restore or a cloud download. A person pressing the button clears anything abandoned for more than ten minutes; the automatic hourly sweep keeps its conservative one-day bar.
• The “Free up server space” card moved from Pro to here, where it belongs: it is housekeeping every install needs. Pro’s button and kill switch now use the same engine.

1.12.1

• Fixed: one backup could send several “backup completed” emails. On a site whose cron runs often, more than one worker can be waiting its turn when a backup finishes. Each of those had read the job’s state before joining the queue, so when the first one finished the job and stood down, the next woke up still believing there was finishing work to do — and did it again. Another retention sweep, another email. One site saw a single backup reported four times in under a minute.
• The state a worker acts on is now read after it takes its turn, not before, so a job that finished while it was waiting is recognised as finished. As a second line of defence, the finishing step is claimed once per backup, so the retention sweep and the completion email cannot run twice however that step is reached.
• This was always possible; it simply became likely on sites where cron runs every few minutes rather than a few times a day.

1.12.0

• An assistant can now change your off-site storage settings, not just read them. It could already tell you that OneDrive was keeping thirty copies; it could not change that to fifteen, so the only way to adjust a setting across a row of sites was to open each one and do it by hand. Retention, the folder backups go into, and whether a destination is used at all can now be set directly — on every destination, including the S3, FTP and SFTP ones Pro adds.
• Connecting storage is deliberately still a job for you. Passwords, keys and the authorisation you grant Google or Microsoft are never accepted this way, and a destination that has never been connected cannot be switched on — that would quietly queue backups to nowhere and leave you thinking they were safe.
• Added: retention can be applied on demand, off-site or on this server, instead of waiting for the next backup to tidy up. Both say what they would remove and both require confirming, because deleted copies do not come back.
• Added: a destination can be disconnected, which forgets the stored connection and leaves every copy already uploaded exactly where it is.
• Added: uploads that failed and are waiting out their back-off can be retried immediately, for when the thing they were unhappy about has been fixed.
• Added: the configuration can be exported from one site and applied to another — schedule, what is included, retention, exclusions, notifications and per-destination settings. No credentials, tokens or passphrases travel with it, and it can only adjust storage a site has already connected itself.
• Added: a single support report gathering the environment line, versions, health, schedule and storage, so reporting a problem no longer means collecting five things by hand.

1.11.0

• Rewriting the web address is now your choice, not something that just happens to you. Restoring a site always rewrote every mention of the old address in the database to the new one. That is right almost every time — but not always, and there was no way to say no. Restoring a client’s site onto a test install to look at their data, or putting a site back where it came from, both want the database left alone. The Restore window now asks, with the rewrite ticked by default so the common case is still one click.
• Untick it and the database is restored word-for-word as it was dumped, still referring to the site it came from. The log says plainly which of the two happened, so you are never left guessing why links point where they do.
• The site address itself is still always pointed at the install you are restoring onto, whichever way you set that tick. Without it WordPress would redirect every request back to the original site and you would not be able to reach your own copy — that is a lockout, not an option.

1.10.8

• The uploader now adjusts itself to your connection. Piece size used to be worked out from your host’s PHP limits alone, which says nothing about the line the file has to travel down — so on a slow uplink a single 16 MB piece could take minutes, and one blip meant sending all of it again. It now measures the speed it is actually getting and sizes each piece to take about forty seconds: large pieces on a fast line, smaller ones on a poor one, never above what your host accepts or below 1 MB.
• Progress now shows megabytes uploaded, the speed you are getting and roughly how long is left, instead of a bare percentage — and a short panel explains that closing the tab pauses the upload, that nothing is lost if it does stop, and that uploading a backup changes nothing on your site by itself. Closing the tab mid-upload now asks first.
• Fixed: a piece could in principle be written to the wrong place in a resumed upload. The browser sends a piece index alongside the byte offset, and that index was derived from the piece size — so once the size changed mid-upload (on a strict server, or now as it adapts) the index no longer meant what the server would read it as, and a later piece could look like the first one and truncate the file. The server prefers the byte offset, so this could not be reached in normal use, but the index is now simply first-piece or not, which is true whatever the size does.

1.10.7

• Fixed: an encrypted backup could not be uploaded. Importing a .zip.enc file — the encrypted copy the plugin itself puts in your off-site storage — was refused with “That is not a .zip file”. Your own backup was being told it was not a backup. Encrypted backups now upload normally and are unlocked automatically on arrival using this site’s passphrase, the same way a cloud restore already did it. Encryption is detected by reading the file, not by its name, so a renamed backup still works.
• Fixed: housekeeping only ran when a backup finished or when off-site storage was in use. A site with off-site switched off never swept its staging folder, so an interrupted restore or an abandoned upload could sit there indefinitely. It is now hooked to the hourly watchdog that runs on every site regardless of settings.
• The Support tab’s “More from DadsFam” has been rebuilt: every plugin now has its own card, the ones available on WordPress.org are marked, and the guide sites and hosting are listed properly instead of being left out.

1.10.6

• Fixed: the screen did not catch up when a job finished. A backup finishing is not the end of the work — it hands over to an off-site upload that finishes later still, and nothing was watching for that. So the panel could sit on “your backup is on its way off-site” long after it had safely arrived, until you reloaded the page yourself. It now refreshes on its own the moment nothing is running any more, whether that is a backup, an upload, or a download from the cloud.
• The refresh happens exactly once per job and never on an idle screen, so a dashboard you have left open does not reload itself for no reason.

1.10.5

• Fixed: a site whose backups had all gone off-site was told it had none. If your local copies are deleted once they are safely uploaded — the recommended setup — the dashboard could announce “your site is not backed up yet” and ask you to make your first backup, on a site with dozens of them. The cause: the list of what is in your cloud storage is deliberately cleared the moment an upload succeeds, and an empty list was being read as an empty cloud. It now falls back to the upload log, which is always right, and says “checking” while it re-reads.
• Fixed: the guided setup would not go away. Because of the same fault, the first two steps never ticked off, so the “Finish your safety net” panel kept nagging sites that were already fully set up. It now ticks correctly and disappears as it was meant to.
• Fixed: pressing Back Up Now did not visibly change anything. The backup started and the console filled up, but the status panel still said what it said before, so the only way to see it change was to reload the page yourself. It now switches to “Backing up your site now” the instant you press it, and puts itself back if the backup fails.
• The off-site upload progress bar is back. Uploads showed only in the console; there is now a proper bar with the destination and the byte count again, sitting in the off-site panel.
• Fixed: the tiles were counting only what is on this server, so the same screen could say “32 backups you can restore” at the top and “1 ready to restore” just below it. Fixed: the “Off-site copies” tile could read “On this server”, which is the opposite of what it is for.

1.10.4

• Added screenshots to this plugin’s WordPress.org page so you can see what you are installing before you install it.
• Same plugin as 1.10.3 otherwise — no code changed.

1.10.3

• The whole plugin has been redesigned around one question: if your site broke right now, would you be all right? The Dashboard answers it first, in a sentence, in plain English, before a single number — then the detail sits underneath for anyone who wants it.
• The screen no longer reads as white boxes on a white page: a proper masthead with the navigation built into it, cards that sit off the page instead of being outlined onto it, larger type, and colour that always means the same thing — green is safe, amber is worth a look, red needs you.
• The live activity console is now part of the free plugin. The window under the progress bar that shows what the server is actually doing, line by line, while a backup runs — it used to sit in the Pro add-on, which meant anybody on the free plugin watching a long backup had only a bar moving and no idea whether it was working or stuck. That was never right. It is core to how this plugin works and it belongs here.
• It now reports more than it used to: the backup being built, a restore being applied, an off-site upload with its real byte count and percentage, a backup being pulled back down from the cloud, and anything still waiting in the upload queue. A small light in its title bar pulses only while something is genuinely running, so one glance tells you whether the machine is busy or you are just looking at history.
• Fixed along the way: the off-site upload line had silently stopped appearing after off-site storage moved into the free plugin in 1.9.0, because it was still reading an option that nothing writes any more. It works again.
• New: a guided setup that tells you what “finished” looks like. Three steps — make a backup, keep a copy off the server, put it on autopilot — with a progress bar and one button pointing at whichever you have not done. It ticks itself off as you go and disappears entirely once you are properly covered, so it never nags a site that is already safe.
• New: the Dashboard is now six large tiles you press, each showing its own live state with a green or grey dot, instead of six words in a menu bar. Big targets, plain names — “Put my site back” rather than “Restore”.
• New: “If the worst happens” — a plain-English recovery plan built into the plugin. Four things that actually go wrong, each one telling you exactly what to do about it: a broken update, a hack, hosting that has vanished, something deleted by mistake. Written to be read by somebody in a panic.
• Choosing what to back up is now six large tiles that light up when ticked, readable at arm’s length, instead of six small checkboxes.
• Your backups list now shows each backup as its own row card rather than a line in a grid.
• Everything respects your system’s reduced-motion setting.
• Fixed: the Dashboard tab ignored your off-site backups completely. If you had connected Google Drive or OneDrive and let the local copies go, the headline figures still read “0 backups stored” with dashes for the last backup and its size, and there was no sign anywhere on that screen of the copies sitting safely in your cloud storage. The off-site engine itself was working the whole time — it was only the Dashboard that never learned to ask. Those three figures now count every backup you have, wherever it is kept.
• Added: a protection line under the figures that tells you in one sentence whether your most recent backup has actually made it off-site, is still queued to go, or is only on this server.
• Added: an “Off-site backups” panel on the Dashboard listing your five most recent backups and where each one is being kept, so you can see at a glance that the copies are really there without opening the Off-site tab.
• Added: a Support tab. Every way to reach a human, the version and environment details worth quoting when you do, and the handful of checks that answer most questions before they get asked.
• Note for Pro users: the off-site figures on the Dashboard used to be drawn by the Pro add-on, which meant they disappeared for everyone else when off-site storage became free in 1.9.0. They are part of this plugin now. Update DadsFam Backups Pro to 1.6.2 alongside this release.

1.10.1

• Housekeeping for the WordPress.org plugin review. Google Drive and OneDrive came across from the Pro add-on in 1.9.0, and that code had never been through the review checks — it was written for a self-hosted plugin. Every one of its direct network and file calls now carries a plain explanation of why it is there: ranged, resumable transfers and chunked reads of very large archives are the whole reason this plugin finishes where others time out, and neither can be done with the helpers the review normally expects.
• Fixed: the terms and privacy links in the readme pointed at pages that do not exist. They now point at the real privacy policy, which covers both.
• No change to how the plugin behaves. This release is about the paperwork.

1.10.0

• Added: thirteen more things an AI assistant can do for you through an MCP plugin such as WPVibe — thirty in total now. It can delete a backup you point at, hand you a private download link, scan the server for backups it does not know about yet, tell you how much room your backups take and how much disk is left, read and rebuild your schedule when its cron event goes missing, clear the activity log, send a test notification email, test an off-site destination that has started failing, list what is actually sitting in your cloud storage, show the upload queue, and stop an upload or a cloud download that is running.
• Restoring is still deliberately not something an assistant can trigger. Neither is starting a restore by any other indirect route. That stays a decision you make yourself, on purpose.
• Deleting a backup and clearing the log are both marked as destructive and ask for confirmation first, so an assistant cannot quietly throw away the thing you were relying on.
• Download links handed out this way are private and time-limited, exactly like the ones from the Backups screen.

1.9.0

• Off-site backups are now part of the free plugin. Connect Google Drive or OneDrive on the new Off-site tab and every backup gets a second home automatically. One click to connect — no API keys, no developer setup, no license.
• Restore straight from the cloud, free. Lost the server, or let the local copy go to save space? Pick one of your off-site backups and DadsFam pulls it back onto the site for you, then a Restore button appears. Nothing to download to your computer, nothing to re-upload, no filenames to type.
• The restore screen lists your cloud backups as a proper picker rather than a dropdown: the date and time first and large, then where each one is stored, how big it is, whether it is encrypted, and whether it is already on this site. Pick a row and only the questions that actually apply to that backup appear.
• Uploads and downloads run in slices and continue in the background, so a large backup finishes on a slow shared host instead of hitting the PHP time limit — and picks up from the exact byte if the connection drops or you close the tab.
• Fixed: the dashboard widget called a site “not protected” whenever there was no backup on the server — even with recent copies sitting safely off-site, which is exactly the situation deleting the local copy creates. It now counts off-site copies, says plainly when a backup is held off-site rather than here, and reports how many are stored where.
• Added: choose how many backups to keep at each destination, and optionally delete the local copy once a backup is safely off-site.
• Added: six AI abilities covering the new features, so an assistant connected through an MCP plugin such as WPVibe can list your destinations, send a backup off-site, list every restore point, and pull one back down. Restoring is still never exposed to an assistant — that stays a deliberate step you take yourself.
• If you use DadsFam Backups Pro: Google Drive and OneDrive have moved here from Pro, and your existing connections are carried across untouched — nothing to reconnect. Pro keeps Amazon S3, FTP, SFTP, encrypted off-site copies and advanced schedules, and needs updating to 1.6.0 to work with this release. Until you update it, this plugin leaves off-site storage to Pro so nothing is ever uploaded twice.

1.8.3

• Housekeeping release. An older build (1.7.0) was published to WordPress.org by mistake, which would have rolled sites back to code from several releases earlier. This release republishes the current, correct code so everyone lands back on the right version. If you updated and noticed missing features, updating to 1.8.3 restores them.
• No functional changes from 1.8.2 — the code is identical.

1.8.2

• Added: a plain-English “A word about PRO” note in the readme — what stays free, why the optional add-on exists, and what it does. No features were moved behind a paywall.
• Housekeeping: the readme now lists the current WordPress and PHP versions it is tested against, and the “learn more about Pro” link points at the live plugins site instead of a page that had moved. No code changes.

1.8.1

• Hardening: admin actions now fall back to WordPress’ own admin-ajax address if the plugin’s own settings object ever fails to load, so buttons keep working instead of silently doing nothing. No change to what the plugin does day to day.

1.8.0

• Housekeeping release, prompted by the WordPress.org plugin review. Everything the plugin registers inside WordPress — its settings, …