[Plugin: Backup] Questions and feature suggestions

Hi Artisan,

I’ll try to answer your questions as best I can.

Can you explain what does the option mean that says: “Select never if you want to add a cron job to do backups” ?
What would be the process of doing a cron job, and why would someone need to do that? Isn’t that what this plugin doing already, when it’s running a schedules backup and uploading it to Google Drive?

Real cron jobs are scheduled using a cron program found on most UNIX-like operating systems. You need to pass that manual backup URL to them when scheduling a job.

WordPress has built in cron-like functionality, but it’s quite unreliable as it only runs the ‘job’ if there are users accessing your website to trigger the cron, so many people prefer to set up a real cron job instead.

Could the manual backup be a button, instead of just the URL text?

That link is plain text so that people can copy it in order to use it when setting up a cron job.

Could it show the progress of the backup, or at least some sort of feedback that it’s running?

Since that URL is designed to be used for setting up a cron job which runs in the background there is obviously no point in outputting anything on that page.

If anyone else types in the manual URL, would it also trigger a manual backup, or only if that person logged in to WP?

It does get triggered whenever that page is accessed by anyone. Thank you for pointing this out. Now that I think about it it’s not safe for it to work this way. I will probably change it ASAP.

Could there be an option to send a notification email when a backup is done?

Yes, I should probably add this feature.

Can the archive file name be more descriptive? Right now it says: 1339720169.zip, could it be WP_2012-06-15 or something similar?

That number is a UNIX timestamp and I was thinking of having the option to at least prepend a string to it.

What happens when the maximum number of backup is reached, does the oldest one gets delated from Google Drive?

Yes.

Thanks for all your feedback!