BTFU — Back The Files Up

BTFU stands for Back The Files Up. Officially. Whatever else you think it might stand for says more about you than about us.

BTFU gives you git-style checkpoints for a whole WordPress site — files and database together — from a single button in the admin bar.

Take a snapshot, attach a note, break something, roll back. Hover the admin bar to see every snapshot with its note, timestamp, and size.

This is a development tool. It warns loudly if it thinks it is running in production.

It is also destructive by design. A restore overwrites your files and database; anything changed since the snapshot is lost unless you keep the automatic safety snapshot. BTFU’s snapshots live on the same server as the site — before you rely on it, have an independent, off-server backup from your normal backup tool.

Why another backup plugin?

Backup plugins protect you from disasters. This protects you from yourself, five minutes ago. It is built for the loop developers actually live in: snapshot, experiment, compare, roll back, repeat.

• One click, one note. “before checkout refactor” — attached to the exact state it describes.
• Hardlinked snapshots. The second snapshot costs only what changed. Twenty snapshots of a 2 GB site is nowhere near 40 GB.
• Honest sizes. Every snapshot shows its unique size — the bytes you actually get back by deleting it — because with shared storage, apparent size is a lie.
• Every restore is undoable. An automatic safety snapshot is taken before any restore. Rolling back can itself be rolled back.
• A standalone rescue script. Restores the site from the command line — or, password-gated, the browser — even when WordPress is a white screen. It is the same code path as normal restores, so it can never quietly rot.
• Exclude what you don’t need. File patterns (rsync-style, plus a .btfuignore file) and database tables (structure-only, with core tables locked out — see FAQ).
• WP-CLI. wp btfu snap "note", list, restore, verify, prune, doctor, selftest.

Restores are resumable: files AND database are imported in time-budgeted
chunks, so even large sites restore without hitting a request timeout.

What it deliberately does NOT do

• Multisite (refuses to activate — a half-captured network is worse than none)
• Move snapshots between sites/domains (serialized-data search-replace is out of scope)
• Scheduled backups, offsite storage — this is a checkpoint tool, not a backup product

Disclaimer

Copyright © 2026 John Kirker Inc. All rights reserved.

BTFU is destructive. It overwrites and deletes files and database tables,
and restoring a snapshot can irreversibly lose current data. It is provided
“AS IS”, with NO WARRANTY of any kind. Use with caution — at your own risk and
peril. It is not intended for production use. By installing or using it you
accept all risk and, to the maximum extent permitted by law, waive all claims
against John Kirker Inc. and the author. Keep independent backups. The full
disclaimer and limitation of liability ship with the plugin as DISCLAIMER.txt.

Privacy

BTFU makes no external requests of any kind — no telemetry, no
update pings, no third-party services. The only HTTP request it ever performs
is a one-off fetch of this site’s own URL to verify the snapshot store is not
web-readable. All snapshots stay on this server. Uninstalling preserves
snapshots unless you explicitly opt in to deleting them; generated rescue
scripts are always removed on uninstall.