Feature request: Jetpack Backup (.tar.gz) upload feature to restore backup without manual restore on Calypso

retnonindya commented 3 years ago

My apologies if this is not the correct place to ask. Feel free to transfer/move the issue to appropriate repo 🙏

What Is it possible if we can have some kind of feature where users can upload their .tar.gz file (Jetpack Backup) to their website without having to do manual restore? https://jetpack.com/support/manually-restore-a-backup/

Why

In our Support doc: https://wordpress.com/support/restore/#restoring-from-a-backup

... Backup restore is for a currently active website. For example, the user wanted to restore their site to time point A. They can do so from Jetpack > Backup.

However, sometimes users have the backup file in .tar.gz format. They want to restore it, and the only way to do so is by using manual restore: https://jetpack.com/support/manually-restore-a-backup/

Manual restore is time-consuming, and the process itself is intimidating for users without technical knowledge.

There have been some discussions about it on Slack:

p1611192631025100-slack-C03TY6J1A
p1611119231142000-slack-C3GP81E05

How

So, uhhhh, I really hope this won't come off as ignorant ("easy to say than done..."-situation)

I'm thinking a tool on Calypso that able to decompress the .tar.gz file and upload the files automatically -- to its appropriate place depending on the file type, SFTP or PHPMyAdmin. The website needs to be an Atomic website (AT) and has an appropriate paid plan (Business plan or eCommerce plan). It will also able to update the database prefix accordingly.

Caveat:

If the user has incompatible plugin on the website. Uploading the whole thing automatically will create issue
wp-config.php conflict (sometimes users have snippets on wp-config.php which cause the website stopped working). This also related with additional folders such as wp-admin folder that this cause Error 403 on AT sites. By making things "automatic", this will overwrite everything on the website -- and this is also one of regular issues on migrated websites.

Thank you for checking this request 🙏

github-actions[bot] commented 3 years ago

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mrfoxtalbot commented 3 years ago

Thank you for reporting @retnonindya ! +10000 to this. If nothing else, we should support our own backups! I have added a few tags and I am going to see if we can have some more eyes take a look at this.

villanovachile commented 3 years ago

This would be amazing. I get requests far more than one would think, requesting to copy an Atomic site’s content to another Atomic site.

As we all know, the everything importer does not work when trying to import from a .com hosted site, and I’d rather recommend an in house solution than something like AIOWPM.

tellisbethel commented 3 years ago

I had a user who would have benefited from this recently! The thread is a bit difficult to parse, but it's essentially about migrating back and forth between their staging and live site: 4189329-zd-woothemes. (This isn't the first time I've come across this, but I just found out about this issue.)

khristiansnyder commented 3 years ago

I would LOVE to see this added. Many need to pause development on their site for some time and cancel their Business plan. We often advise to download a backup, but we have no way to import that backup back to a site here which is a huge feature gap and a great opportunity to improve our product :)

I have had many users quite shocked over the years when I send them the Jetpack manual restore instructions after I tell them our own backups cannot be imported to our sites easily.

mrfoxtalbot commented 3 years ago

@jeherve, do you think this issue should be transferred to the Jetpack repository?

jeherve commented 3 years ago

@mrfoxtalbot That's not something we'll be able to do in the Jetpack repository I'm afraid. I would recommend asking the Backup team about this, as it may be on their radar and tracked somewhere else already.

mrfoxtalbot commented 3 years ago

Thank you @jeherve! I know that @nunyvega is working on backups at the moment.

Alvaro, could you please bring this to your team's attention, just to see if they can do a quick triage of the scope of this issue and to what extent it could be added to your backlog? Thank you!

nunyvega commented 3 years ago

Hey @mrfoxtalbot ✋ thanks for the ping! I'll bring this up for discussion on the Backup team and we'll update this issue.

katiebethbrown commented 3 years ago

Wanted to drop a note mentioning that as we work to automate downgrades we are prompting users to download backups before they cancel, which will likely increase the amount of support interactions where users ask how to use those backups.

pdgTfM-3T-p2

Nic-Sevic commented 3 years ago

Just adding that I have also had multiple users that would have greatly benefitted from this feature. I also think this could work as a good alternative “everything import” for those users that are trying to migrate here but have already moved the domain from their external site to here. Rather than having to unsubscribe their domain name and move it back to their old site in order to use the automated tool (because they almost never know the default address of their old site), they could leave the domain as is and just download the backup from the old site and then import it here. This would also help us avoid having to recommend AIOWPM in those cases.

katiebethbrown commented 3 years ago

I also think this could work as a good alternative “everything import” for those users that are trying to migrate here but have already moved the domain from their external site to here.

Big +1 to this. It would be especially helpful for users that are having trouble getting the backup from their old host to complete successfully (the first step in the everything import).

JoshuaGoode commented 3 years ago

I recently worked on a situation where we still had the backups on file for the source site but there's no easy way for us to restore them to a WPCOM site.

p9F6qB-7uh-p2

It'd be nice to have an easy option to restore both files and backups we have on file on our end to a specific blog ID.

Even better, it'd be nice to be able to route those backups through the WPCOM migration tool as it applies some charset fixes and other tasks IIRC.

jartes commented 2 years ago

We had one user case here: 4372553-zd-woothemes Internal post: p9F6qB-7yG-p2

kosiew commented 2 years ago

Triaging for developers' further investigation.

philnick206 commented 2 years ago

Adding another request for this type of feature here #32893540-hc

ccwalburn commented 2 years ago

Adding another user request

[ ] 36120132-hc

github-actions[bot] commented 2 years ago

Support References

This comment is automatically generated. Please do not edit it.

[ ] 4189329-zen
[ ] 4372553-zen
[ ] p9F6qB-ctn-p2#comment-53776
[ ] 6419672-zen
[ ] 7786226-zen
[ ] 7836999-zen
[ ] 8103751-zen

JoshuaGoode commented 2 years ago

@Automattic/yamato-backup Is such a feature in the roadmap for Jetpack Backup? Would this issue be better served in another repo?

It's causing enough problems that we now have a feature request to warn users that there isn't a way to just upload and restore it https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/65801

This might be an area for the importer / @Automattic/caribou as well.

Reitertaring that this is especially useful for sites that reverted or downgraded but are returning to WPCOM Atomic and we no longer have on-file backups.

Note that other services and apps make importing manual and Jetpack backups easy. Here's an example of Local's drag-and-drop backup importer that works very well with Jetpack backups. Users can drop it right in and spin up a site. I stop the recording early but the site starts and is accessible right after.

PdtR3Z-cq-p2

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/4887830/181103121-fb86594d-1027-4ca5-9319-6d15ac56209c.mov