What is this wpress format ?

I love All-in-One WP Migration, and an incremental backups feature would be GREAT!

I tried Wpress-Extractor, it doesn’t work.

My Experience:
I spent 45 minutes exporting my site to Google Drive. I then click on the result which leads to “cannot be viewed”. So I press the download button hoping I can make changes with FTP in future.

After another 45 minutes I click on the download but only a blank screen appears in my browser. Not only that, every time I click on the download, a new (useless) download automatically starts, each time demanding 45 minutes of my time.

Then I come to this page to find out that the only way to restore my site is via the plugin. But like Aguett said, what if my site crashes and I can’t login?

Anyway, better a plugin dependent backup than no backup at all I figure. So I login to my site and click on All-in-one WP Migration/backups.
“There are no backups available at this time, why not create a new one?”

Ah, I figure, I should maybe Import the backup I just Exported to Googledrive, so I click the “Import” button and wait another 45 minutes.

Finally, it reaches 100% but something like this message appears:
“This may make changes to themes, plugins and data bases, please make sure you have backed up everything?”

What? I thought THIS WAS my backup!!

I get scared and press the cancel button.

So I end up with nothing.

This plugin is a waste of time. I want my money back and am going to backup my site to my computer with a free program called HTTrack website copier https://www.httrack.com/

Totally support @aguett use case here, I’ve got a 19GB archive of a site handed to me by a client, they can’t even tell me what version it’s running so need to poke around in the raw files. This opaque archive format it not helpful in anyway.

I looks like I am not the only one to get given a .wpress file and not have a clue what to do with it!

After previous experience with proprietary backup formats screwing us over, I am not touching this with a barge pole.

@alex3410

WPRESS is not *proprietary backup format*.

It is open source backup format and there are a few tools available to work with WPRESS archives that are listed in this forum topic. I do not recommend any of them and I do not recommend you to alter a backup that any backup software made, even, if you know what you are doing.

This thread is like the second result when you google ‘wpress file format’, so I suspect a lot of people are going to see it.

I came to this thread looking for a way to poke around inside the file and had the same gut reaction as @aguett, @alex310 and others. But also I appreciate that the plugin works fantastically well for migrating, and after looking at the plugin homepage it doesn’t actually seem to mention being used as a backup solution anywhere.

I agree that it would be fantastic if the files generated were more straightforward ZIP/tarball archives of the native WordPress directory structure. However, if using this format is the price we have to pay for being able to squeeze your entire site (including media!) into one huge file *and* have that huge file be able to bypass upload size restrictions *and* be very fast, personally that’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make. There are plenty of other dedicated backup plugins but none that make frequent migrations (as are often necessary when developing) this straightforward.