Dahu Role Backup

A safety net for WordPress roles and capabilities.

Developed and maintained by Hugo Vial-Jaime — Dahu-Concept.

The problem

WordPress keeps every role and capability in a single option. One plugin writing to it carelessly, one migration, one badly timed update, and a role half the site depends on is gone — with nothing to put back, because nobody ever thought to copy it.

This plugin copies it. Every day, and again whenever the option changes.

How it works

• A snapshot is taken daily, and again whenever the roles option is written, so a change is captured as it happens.
• Nothing is written when the roles are identical to the last snapshot.
• A snapshot that follows a disappearance is marked and shown first.
• Restoring is additive by default — only the missing roles are put back. A full restore is a separate, explicit action.
• A snapshot from another installation is refused, matched on table prefix and option name.

Retention that does not defeat itself

Snapshots are capped — thirty daily, thirty on change — but the best recent one is kept on top of that quota. Without the exception, a run of repeated disappearances would rotate the retention until no copy held the lost roles any more: the safety net would quietly empty itself at exactly the moment it was needed.

Storage

Under wp-content/dahu-role-backups/, not in uploads, which is served by the web server and swept up by synchronisation tools. An .htaccess and an index.php are placed there. On a host where wp-content/ is read-only the plugin falls back to the uploads directory rather than failing silently.

add_filter( 'dahu_role_backup_directory', function () {
    return '/some/path/outside/the/webroot';
} );

WP-CLI

wp dahu-role-backup list
wp dahu-role-backup snapshot
wp dahu-role-backup diff <file>
wp dahu-role-backup restore <file> [--full]

Requirements

Uninstalling

Snapshots are kept. They are the whole point of the plugin, and uninstalling is often a step in reinstalling — a routine that wiped them would be most destructive exactly when the site had a role problem to fix. The directory is left for you to remove knowingly.

External services

None. Snapshots stay on your own server.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.