[Plugin: BackUpWordPress] WARNING truncates posts on import / restore

Great concept, unfortunately it seems to create ANSI files even when the WordPress database is encoded in UTF-8. This means that upon import of a backup, posts that contain certain special characters are truncated.

The developer’s site hasn’t been updated in two years. There is a forum but the registration page is not found. Below is the email that I sent last week; so far no reply. Hack at your own risk!

Mark Berry
MCB Systems
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I installed BackUpWordPress 0.4.5 under WordPress 2.9.2. It’s almost perfect for what I need, with one small problem: it creates corrupt database backups.

Specifically, if a post contains certain special characters like ± or à, when I restore the database, the imported post is cut off at that character.

The problem seems to be that the data in the database is UTF-8, but the file created by BackUpWordPress is ANSI. You can see this if you open wordpress.sql in Notepad++ and check the encoding. (Possibly this is different on a German operating system?)

I think this may go back to PHP not having native support for UTF-8 (https://php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php).

I’m not really a PHP programmer but looking at bkpwp-classes/manage_backups.php, perhaps if you would change line 693 to

if (!fwrite($handle, utf8_encode($sql))) {

the program would create UTF-8 files which could be imported without truncation.

I’ve tested this once and it does in fact create a UTF8 file. When I import that file using PhpAdmin, it works correctly–the special characters are included and the posts are not truncated. (By the way, I tried the database restore that is built in to BackUpWordPress a couple days ago and I couldn’t get it to work.)

This would need more testing to be sure that it works correctly.

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