No checksum!

On one hand, I love the simplicity of this plugin, but on the other hand, I’ve been burned multiple times by corrupted restorations.

And the thing is, because it doesn’t check the backup file integrity, it’ll happily restore what it can; not tell you there was an issue; and then send you on your way, not realizing there’s a problem until you’ve already opened your doors and received new data in your database.

So then you have to decide whether it’s better to try to:

1) Somehow fix the corrupted data
2) Lose the new additions to your db by redoing the restoration, or
3) Or manually sift through everything and try to merge working with non-working versions of the db; joy! (This literally cost me days-worth of time and effort, all while my site sat there with a parking page up.)

I eventually discovered that if there’s an issue, I can simply redo the site restoration using the exact same file, and it’ll work fine the second time. (Which would mean my days-worth of effort was basically for nothing; adding insult to injury.)

This tells me that it’s not the backup file that’s the problem, but rather, it’s likely an intermittent internet connection when uploading, combined with the fact that the software is somehow not intelligent enough to protect against that which is the issue.

If I were making a backup plugin, I would think that checking the integrity of the backup file once it’s uploaded to the new site would be pretty close to the top of my checklist of mandatory features, but – ya know – I’m not.