What I never question:
I typically run way too many no less than 40 plugins on my main WordPress site. It’s a daily chore to keep up with all of the updates and I frequently question if I should keep them all or prune the list.
One plugin I never question is the WP-DBManager. Here’s the description, direct from the developers site:
Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.
I get an email every day (which gets archived automatically via GMail) containing the entire contents of my database: plugin settings, general site information, and all of my posts/pages. Sure, my web host does daily backups too, but I prefer the peace of mind of knowing it’s really safe.
Nothing EVER Goes Wrong
This became incredibly important the other day when I was updating a few sites to the latest WordPress 2.7. I was down to my last site to update, all of the others had been great, but for some reason on the last site it got to the database update process and the unimaginable happened: all of my content was gone.
Thanks to WP-DBManager, however, it took a couple of minutes to get it all back.
So if you only have one plugin on your WordPress.org site, make sure it’s the one that saves all of your content 🙂
