Safe to drop ‘extra’ database tables?

  • Hello,

    General question about WordPress database tables. Can I delete any table in phpMyAdmin that’s not my normal “custom_prefix_wp_table”?

    I have a database only used for WordPress. I’ve been building an e-commerce site with WooCommerce and a host of other plugins to include security, backup, and others. By chance I took a look at the tables in my database and there looks to be 3 complete sets of tables, so triple what I was expecting. I see my normal set, and the two other sets have an unknown string before my custom prefix. Is it safe to drop what looks to be two more sets of tables with random prefixes? If they’re not needed, they’re essentially tripling my database size.

    I’m thinking they might have been generated as a fallback plan for a previous backup plugin which I’ve used to restore the site for testing, and are no longer used?

    I’m very careful on which plugins I install, and how I uninstall them, using any kind of remove data option I can find. This took me by surprise and am looking for someone that knows more than I do to help me along.

    Thanks for your help, happy holidays!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    It’s *probably* safe to drop them. Backup first. ??

    Thread Starter briankross

    (@briankross)

    ??

    Thank you, will do!

    Thread Starter briankross

    (@briankross)

    Update: These ended up being BackupBuddy’s way to roll back the database to previous states. You can set it to backup only WordPress tables (minus previous states), or the entire database (to include these previous states).

    Thanks again.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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