Wordfence conflct w/Duplicator; crashes site

I’ve been trying to do something that is routine – design a site on a dev.URL.com and migrate it to the main URL.com when done with the design work. Well, at least that USED to be routine.

Unfortunately, the process of using Duplicator to create a zipped-up package of all the contents of the site – then FTP’ing the zip file to the new server – NO LONGER WORKS BECAUSE OF WORDFENCE.

Here’s the problem: Wordfence apparently kicks up errors during the Duplication process because it uses camelCase in some filenames. No big deal, you say? Well, check out the lovely errors is causes: “Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0
Fatal error: Unknown: Failed opening required ‘/home/URL/dev.URL.com/wordfence-waf.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/local/lib/php:/usr/local/php5/lib/pear’) in Unknown on line 0.”

So. Tried to migrate after deactivating Wordfence. Nope.

Tried migrating after deleting Wordfence. Nope.

Meanwhile, the site then crashed, delivering “200 Server Error” messages.

Spent 2 hours on chat with hosting company. They suggested migrating the site manually.

Had to delete everything in the URL.com directory. Time spent: 2 hours.

Had to delete the entire MySQL database, because Wordfence had totally polluted the database.

Had to spin up an entirely new MySQL database.

Meanwhile, dev.URL.com site was down. Had to do a “Restore” of the site to get it back up.

Downloading the dev.URL.com site. Tried de-activating the Wordfence plugin.

Site promptly broke.

What seems to be going on with Wordfence? If you try to deactivate it, it breaks the site? If you delete it, it breaks the site? If you try to migrate a site, it breaks the site?