Free Memory Eating WordPress Backup To Dropbox Plugin

Written by remco on May 8, 2011 in Internet - 5 Comments

The new “WordPress Backup To Dropbox” plugin is exactly what I needed. I tend to do a lot of customizing in templates, plugins and even the core which tend to go lost when execute an upgrade without thinking. The new plugin makes it possible to completely automatic backup your WordPress blog to you Dropbox, giving blog owners an ease of mind.

Great idea, pretty good execution at first sight, however, within 5 minutes after starting the first backup I received a message from my webhost.

Shortly after this message I received the same message again with the changed status “process killed” even though the whole backup was successful.

My guess as a (intermediate) techie guy is that the zipping process was guilty and probably the fact that I hit the “backup now” button twice because I saw nothing happen after the first time.

One thing that I found in the settings of this plugin is that it has two settings that are contradicting. In the “Day And Time” field you have to select on which day you want the backup to be executed, making it a once in a week backup while this makes the setting “Frequency” completely useless. Anyway, please drop your experience with this plugin in the comments, thanks!

5 Comments on "Free Memory Eating WordPress Backup To Dropbox Plugin"

  1. Ridho May 8, 2011 at 10:11 pm · Reply

    I’m big fans of both dropbox and WordPress. But .. Wow .. 444MB of memory usage. I don’t think that my VPS can’t handle this ..

    Try VaultPress sir.. I’ve been using this several month, and pretty much assured that my WordPress sites is in a good hand..

    Thanks

  2. remco May 8, 2011 at 10:14 pm · Reply

    Thanks for the tip Ridho! I try it one more time with this plugin but I’m pretty sure I will then have to follow your advice.

  3. Michael De Wildt May 9, 2011 at 12:07 pm · Reply

    Gday remco,

    How big is the zip archive created for your website? I am aware if the high memory usages for large WordPress installations and am trying to gather as much information as possible to get this figure down.

    If you are interested I posed a fair bit of info on the core of the problem here - http://www.mikeyd.com.au/2011/05/08/wordpress-backup-to-dropbox-0-7-1/

    Cheers,
    Michael

  4. remco May 9, 2011 at 1:40 pm · Reply

    Hi Michael. The size of the zip archive is pretty big, around 202 MB. Maybe it would be an idea to give the option to don’t use zip and to do some incremental/differential backup to speedup the process.

  5. Michael De Wildt May 10, 2011 at 9:42 am · Reply

    Gday remco,

    According to my testing the upload via the Dropbox PHP libraries requires approx 2.5 times that amount to get the job done. Therefore, in your case, it will set the PHP memory limit to 505 megabytes in order to complete the upload. Excessive - Yes!

    I have some ideas to optimise this process and ditching the zip for a incremental/differential backup is a good idea.

    At the moment the plugin works for people, like myself, who only have rather small installations. Hopefully when it nears 1.0 it will work for larger sites like this one!

    Thanks for the feedback.

    Cheers,
    Michael

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