Simple and Effective

After a security breach we decided to wipe our WP installation and try a restore.

After a moment of panic when the backups didn’t appear in the GUI, we carefully followed the manual FTP instructions and found the 10 backups, restored the most recent one, and restored the site.

A few notes for someone else restoring a backup:

1. in our case the folder on the wp-content directory was NOT backup, rather ‘backupwordpress-####-bakckups’ with the hash tags some random numbers. In there were our 10 most recent backups.

2. note that for us re-enabling the backup plugin blew away our 10 most recent backups (which was fine because in our case the backup worked). But you may wish to make a local copy of your most recent backup before proceeding… which is what we inadvertently did anyway because we went with the local restore option… which required us to make a local copy first.

3. In our case there were multiple version of the SQL database… I assume it’s in date order we just picked the last one.

4. When you try to log back into your wp-admin page a requester comes up telling you the database is being restored. I guess that’s normal.

5. Although our theme was restored it was not active. We had to activate it via the themes page.

6. Success! Thanks, developers!!!