Do not trust this to back up your database

We manage WordPress websites for 50+ clients and for years have relied on iThemes Security for security and database backup.

Unfortunately database backups for 3 different client sites (that we have tested so far) failed to restore. Also we find that the backups use a separate insert statement for every single row, which causes them to be much larger and take much longer to restore (when they do restore) than, for example, backups taken via phpMyAdmin.

We have no choice but to switch to another backup solution. It was suggested we try Backup Buddy but given it’s from iThemes we do not feel comfortable trusting it.

If you use iThemes for backup, please test restoring a backup and make sure it works.

We will continue to use iThemes for security, and value it for that. Without the backup we’d give it 5 stars, but the fact that it is presented as a viable backup solution when apparently it’s known (at least by others in the community) that it cannot be relied on is galling. So 2 stars it is.