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So after last night’s terrible loss of data I decided something had to be done. My host has already arranged for binary backups to be made but I thought there must be some wordpress plugins that keep a copy of your wordpress tables so I began my search. There were a couple that caught my attention so I installed them and had a play and now I’ve made my choice, DBC Backup.

It can be found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dbc-backup/ I tried three in total one was BackUpWordPress but I had to abandon that because it wouldn’t let me save my backups outside the webroot. Another was WP-DB-Backup which required that I ‘temporarily’ changed the permissions of my
wp-content folder so it could create its own for backups. The hassle of installing that one put me off it. One of them although I don’t remember which had a paypal donation button on all the pages which I didn’t really like either. I think that’s the sort of thing that you put on your website not in a plugin but that’s just my opinion.

Finally I settled on DBC Backup because;

• It’s nice and clean
• It creates backups at set intervals or manually
• It doesn’t handle restoration just the dump
• It backs up all the tables in the database not just the wordpress ones
• I can configure the backups to be stored outside the webroot

My only issue was that it decided to create its menu using add_menu_page(…) which creates a top-level page. I thought this was unnecessary considering the plugin only has one page to interact with and the wordpress codex recommends that you only add these for plugins which require many screens.

I much preffered the idea of it being a sub-menu of Manage (edit.php) so I decided to edit the plugin. The desired modification takes place in the dbcbackup.php file in the DBC plugin directory. I made the following changes;

• On line 80
  • Change “if(function_exists(’add_menu_page))”
  • To “if(function_exists(’add_submenu_page))”
• On line 82
  • Change “add_menu_page(xxx)”
  • To “add_submenu_page(’edit.php’, xxx)”
  • Where xxx represents the existing arguments to the function

The arguments to the function add_submenu_page are the same as for add_menu_page except that there is a new initial argument that specifies which page to add the sub-menu to. I also changed the ‘DB Cron Backup’ value to just ‘Backup’ because that’s all I wanted to see in the sub-menu.

That’s it, I think its a great plugin and now that I’ve got it set up how I like it I’m happy.