Now that February has ended …

Sad but true that the program is not yet ready for prime time.

What happened?

I made a seriously big mistake and have spent the last couple or three weeks fixing it.

I was testing the backup & restore functions in the WP Maintenance Robot and I boobooed.

I restored an old and incorrect database to my main website.  The backup worked fine, unfortunately, and I trashed my site completely.

I have now proved that it is possible to restore a WordPress database manually but it is a time consuming and very painful way to do it.  A couple of the tables took 4-5 days to rebuild.

I made mistakes in the rebuild as well, my WordFence plugin lost all it's settings even though I thought I had them right.

I'll just have to re-install it and set it up again.

Why did I have to test the backup and restore functions.

In their infinite wisdom Oracle have 'fixed' the 'security issue' with mysqlbackup.

They decided that putting the username and password in plain text on the command line on your own servers was insecure.

To fix this they have implemented a 'secure' system.  Now you need to create a secure and encrypted file and call that on the command line.

This is actually less secure than the previous system because a hacker no longer needs to know your username and password, all they have to do is use the default file name and all your data are theirs.

To implement this remotely for every unknown site really isn't possible so I had to do a complete rewrite of the backup process.  That was an unexpected delay but it's pretty much done.

The real test is to restore a site from a backup I made, this time I'll do a proper database dump first just in case it fouls up again.

These little issues have put the delivery of the program back by about a month I guess but there is another issue to deal with.

My wife and I have a wedding to go to in Bali in 3 weeks time, 5 weeks after we get back from that we go to Europe for 7 weeks.

If it's not ready before then you won't get to see it before the end of July.

Definitely keen to get this done and out there.