UpdraftPlus 1.11.1 / 2.11.1 – including UpdraftPlus Vault (with free allowance for Premium users)

UpdraftPlus 1.11.1 (free version) / 2.11.1 (paid version) is in the process of being released. You should see it appear in your WordPress dashboard in the next day or two.

It’s been a couple of months since our last release, and we’ve been working very hard on getting UpdraftPlus Vault ready. We’re really thrilled to say: it’s now out there! UpdraftPlus Vault storage is the easiest-to-set-up option for UpdraftPlus users, and comes from your already-trusted provider. Your backups can be managed from your WordPress dashboard, and by logging in to your updraftplus.com account (useful for if you lose access to your dashbaord). You can even resell it to clients. Go here to read more. Of course, all previous storage options (Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc.) continue to be available as before.

All UpdraftPlus Premium users with a current purchase (i.e. within the last 12 months) now have access to a free 1Gb of storage space for their backups. UpdraftPlus Vault is for everyone – all users of any version can purchase space at this link, with discounts available for larger amounts and pre-payment.

Beyond UpdraftPlus Vault, this release has been tested on the forthcoming WordPress 4.3, there are also a few new features for Amazon S3 users, and speed-ups for everyone. Beyond that, there is a long list of small tweaks for better usability, efficiency and bug fixes.

This is our best UpdraftPlus yet, and we recommend everyone updates. If you’ve not yet checked out UpdraftPlus Premium, our flagship product, then please do take a look! Find out why UpdraftPlus is the #1 most used backup plugin for WordPress, with half a million active websites being backed up.

The full changelog, with details of every change, follows.

• Feature: UpdraftPlus Vault storage – simple to set up storage from your trusted provider – with 1Gb of free storage for UpdraftPlus Premium customers – and more storage available for anyone to purchase. All other storage options (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) remain available, of course!
• Feature: S3 enhanced wizard now allows the user to optionally deny the new Amazon Web Services IAM user download and/or delete permissions, for an even more secure setup (at the cost of some convenience – you will need to download/restore/delete S3 backups outside of UpdraftPlus).
• Feature: Amazon S3 in UpdraftPlus Premium now supports optional server-side encryption
• Feature: An “UpdraftPlus” menu now appears on the WP admin bar, allowing quick access.
• Compatibility: Tested and compatible with WordPress 4.3
• Speed: For users’ whose backups are created with a zip binary (the default engine, where available), CPU usage + zip creation times have been significantly reduced
• Speed: For users cloning a website with a large number of users and a changed table prefix, a long and slow series of SQL operations has been replaced with a single fast one
• Fix: The chunk-uploading algorithm for Copy.Com could unnecessarily upload the same chunks multiple times. We have not had any reports, but we believe it’s also theoretically possible that a Copy.Com upload could have been corrupted by the same issue, so recommend updating for all Copy.Com users.
• Fix: Fix issue with site cloning whereby on sites with very large numbers of entries in the postmeta table that needed search/replacing, some could be omitted (in the case seen, the table had >600,000 entries)
• Fix: Saving the settings immediately after authenticating with Copy.Com resulted in being redirected to WP’s page for all settings.
• Fix: If PHP was killed by the webserver during the process of pruning old backups, then this would not be retried until the next backup, thus potentially leaving more backups than desired around in remote storage in the meanwhile.
• Fix: Log files sometimes failed to mention the MySQL version
• Translations: Various updated translations – thanks to our translators
• Tweak: When choosing multiple remote storage options (Premium), these are now stacked via tabs, instead of vertically as before
• Tweak: More help for enormous sites on badly resourced web hosting: part of the enumeration of uploads needing backing up is now cached, allowing more to be time when time limits are short
• Tweak: Secret credentials (e.g. S3 secret key) in the admin area are now starred (as explained in our long-standing FAQ, this does nothing to protect against malicious WordPress co-admins on your site – https://updraftplus.com/faqs/in-the-administration-section-it-shows-my-amazon-ftp-etc-passwords-without-using-stars-is-this-safe/ – but at least we won’t get asked about it so many times!).
• Tweak: Provide more direct help to the user if they are hosting with Strato and get the ‘File Size Limit Exceeded’ zip message
• Tweak: When migrating data directly to a remote site, if the remote site returns a 413 HTTP code (“Request Entity Too Large”), re-try using a smaller chunk size
• Tweak: Log when about to begin encryption of a database file (allowing the progress to be monitored more easily if there’s a problem)
• Tweak: Detect a further case of an incompatible database (that is from a remote source and uses MySQL features not present on the destination server) and warn before attempting to import.
• Tweak: Make the error message shown if trying to restore an incompatible database (that is from a remote source and uses MySQL features not present on the destination server) clearer.
• Tweak: If the user uses “Backup Now” before saving their settings, warn them that the unsaved settings changes won’t apply to this backup
• Tweak: Only warn about very large files found once for each file (rather than once per resumption)
• Tweak: Add the UPDRAFTPLUS_GOOGLEDRIVE_DISABLEGZIP constant – define it as true to work-around broken HTTP setups (possibly broken outgoing proxy?) when accessing Google Drive
• Tweak: When claiming an add-on (paid versions), the user’s updraftplus.com password will automatically be forgotten once it is no longer needed
• Tweak: Handle the case of the user typing in an invalid number of backups to retain more elegantly
• Tweak: No longer require the php-mcrypt module for Dropbox
• Tweak: Also retry a smaller chunk size if it looks like mod_security unhelpfully replaced a 413 HTTP code with a 200 success message despite the operation actually failing for this reason, or if it looks like sending is just timing out before the PHP timeout (so that we don’t get notified).
• Tweak: Added new CA root certificates to store (https://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem)
• Tweak: If the Migrator’s direct-send component drops its chunk size, then store this information so that it doesn’t have to go through the cycle of finding the best chunk size the next time.
• Tweak: Added UPDRAFTPLUS_IPV4_ONLY constant to prevent use of IPv6 (currently implemented by Google Drive only)
• Tweak: Deal with a case where the web host appears to be losing disk I/O near kill time, despite later database writes going through (so, the order of operations was insufficient to guarantee what had been completed). This issue was only cosmetic – backup sets were intact (hence “tweak”, not “fix”)
• Tweak: Increase HTTP timeout for remote site-to-site operations
• Tweak: Don’t cause the ‘debug’ tab to abort rendering if the web host has disabled the gzopen() function (which is an odd/pointless thing to do)
• Tweak: Resolve PHP ‘strict standards’ coding internal notice in Google Drive module

David Anderson (founder, lead developer, UpdraftPlus)