Misses the mark in many ways
First, I like the plugin. it's intuitive, easy to use, and the compressed file sizes are quite small. So why the negative review?
1) It uses its own proprietary compression format, SGBP.
This is a real head scratcher. Why would you go through the trouble of creating a proprietary compression format? The file size differences aren't so great that it warrants this. Wordpress has been uzing zip / tar.gz for almost 20 years with no problems.
2) It uses its own proprietary compression format, SGBP
If you are creating a site and migrating from a dev server to production server, then this plugin works fine. But many times developers have to work with a client's existing site, and how do those files get to you? Zip - they couldn't use SCBP if they wanted to. So I have to unzip their files, install the site, install this plugin, and then rezip the backup so I can use it in the SGBP environment. This is a serious headache. Using a non-standard format just doesn't work in the real world if you want to be efficient.
3) It uses its own proprietary compression format, SGBP
On their website they have instructions on how to download their proprietary extractor. It's available for Mac and Windows - BUT NOT LINUX! Really? You guys do realize just how many people you're alienating by not including the one platform most used by developers?
As well, this seems to be an extractor only, no way to use it to re-archive files, so far as I can tell.
It should be a no brainer that this also support zip / tar.gz formats, even if it's just to convert them from one to another.
After 6 weeks of real world use, dropping this into my workflow has made things much more complicated. I would consider this again when zip / tar.gz support is added.
Susie_BackupGuard
May 9, 2024Hi!
I am Susie from BackupGuard.
Let me address the review regarding the format.
Generally, SGBP is smaller because we have removed many unnecessary headers. So the size will decrease depending on the number of files the archive has. If it has a lot of files, then the difference will be higher.
SGBP can support files bigger than 4GB. Normal zip format, if it's not 64 and you are on a 32-bit processor environment, cannot support more than 4GB of size. We don't have that limitation.
We store very important information in the archive, which helps the plugin to easily work with the backup whenever you want. This is also an important feature, which we cannot achieve with ZIP.
We also plan to have the extractor on Linux as well in the future. We understand how important it is and that's why have added it to our Roadmap.
On another note, we will surely take your feedback regarding having the conversion possibility in the future.