This is the official home page for BackPress, a WordPress backup utility program. If you wish to report a bug or have questions about BackPress email me: “info “at” thedailybizarre.com”, use the BackPress blog post comments for program critique or enhancement suggestions.

What Is BackPress?

BackPress will backup your WordPress site (via FTP) and your WordPress database (via mySQL) into one ZIP archive. The program is designed to run unattended in your system tray, and may be viewed at any time to see the status of your backups. 

You can specify multiple sites to backup, and each site may be backed up at a specific time on any given day of the week. BackPress will create one ZIP archive for each day you back up your site, overwriting any previous backup for that day.  You may choose to backup either the site, the mySQL database or both.

You may restore any backup you’ve created to the original site it was backed up from, a different site, or you may enter specific FTP and mySQL information for the restore location.

What are the program requirements?

The BackPress program requires the Microsoft .NET 2.0  (or higher) framework be installed on your computer.  The .NET framework is not included in the install program.  You may download and install the .NET 2.0 framework directly from Microsoft if you don’t already have it installed on your machine.

BackPress also requires two programs from the mySQL v5.0 suite from Sun Microsystems: mySQL.exe and mySQLDump.exe.  These two programs are used to restore and backup (respectively) the WordPress mySQL database to your local machine.  Feel free to replace these two programs with newer versions of mySQL if you wish, just be sure the newer version supports the same command line parameters as the version 5.0 executables.  Versions of mySQLDump executables lower than 5 will not work with BackPress as the command line parameters that it uses are not available.  Version 5.0 of both mySQL.exe and mySQLDump.exe are included in the BackPress install for your convenience.

As far as computer and operating systems, if you can install and run the .NET Framework then you should be able to install and run BackPress.  I have not tested BackPress on Vista, only XP at this point, mostly because I hate Vista with the white-hot intensity of a thousand exploding suns.  If you will be running it under Vista, be aware the program can modify your RUN registry as well as spawning a new process to backup/restore the mySQL database which means that you should probably run it as Admin.

What Does BackPress Cost?

Nothing, nada, zilch.  Feel free to download, install, copy and distribute it as much as you like if you find it of value.  I only ask that you distribute it unmodified, or provide a link back to this page for the download.   If I can save someone the headaches that I’ve had, then my work here is done. 

Where Do I Get It?

You can download the install program from this link.  Again, the program requires the .NET 2.0 framework or higher be installed on your machine, see the requirements section above for a download link for the framework.

 

Using BackPress

The BackPress main screen contains all of the program options in the top toolbar:

In the center you’ll find a list of the sites you’ve entered to backup.  At the bottom is a processing log that is updated when a site is backed up.    Each site will have a color-coded dot in front of it that indicates the backup result for the site:

  •  Clear/White – Undefined status (site has never been backed up).
  •  Green – Backup was successful.
  •  Red – One or more errors occurred during the backup process.
  •  Yellow – Backup in progress.

The “Backup Result” column will display the result of your last backup, or if a backup is in progress it will show the current step in the backup process.  The last column will display the FTP file count during scanning, or display the bytes downloaded per file when the FTP transfer is in progress.

Program Functions

 Add New Site – Click this to add a new backup site to your backup list.  Your site name may only contain valid file name characters as it is used when creating your ZIP archive.  When entering your FTP server or mySQL server, be sure to just enter the site URL, e.g. ftp.myblog.com or mysql.myblog.com.  Leave the server name box blank if you do not wish to back it up. When entering the ftp root folder do not put any leading slash, e.g “private/myblog” not “/private/myblog”.

 Edit Selected Site – Click this to edit the site you have selected in the list.

 Delete Selected Site – Click this to remove the selected site from your backup list.  If you wish to keep a site but not back it up, just uncheck every day in the backup schedule.

 Backup Selected Site Now – Click this to start an immediate backup for the selected site.  This is a “one-off” backup and will not affect your next scheduled backup.  The backup file for the current day will be overwritten.

 Backup All Sites Now – Click this to start an immediate backup for all sites in your list.  Today’s backup file will be overwritten for each site.

 Abort Backup – Click this to abort a backup in progress for the selected site.

 Backup Result Detail - This will give you the detailed result for each of the 3 steps of the site’s backup should there be an error.  Each step is proceeded by a label (“[SQL]“, “[FTP]” and “[ZIP]“) and the result of that step.  This is where you would look to see why a backup failed.

 Restore Backup – Click this to restore a past backup that you’ve made with BackPress.  Once you click this you may select a backup you’ve made then select either the site you wish to restore it to, or enter specific FTP/mySQL information for the restore process.  The same notes about entering your servers and paths that applied to the add/edit description above also apply here.

Program Settings – Click this to specify how you want BackPress to load and the folder where you want to save your ZIP backups.

Close and Exit – Click this to close BackPress and exit.  This is the only way to exit the program if you have checked the “Send To Tray On Close Button” option in program settings. 

To access the program once it is in your system tray, right-click the BackPress icon () in your tray and select the “Restore Window” option to see the UI or the “Shutdown BackPress” option to close and exit.