Worst ever
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You think you ahve your wordpress site safely backed up , only to find out its going to take hours and hours , to achieve use a backup when you need it. They dont provide a free easy recovery method…the recovery method cost 40 gbp
Absolute ripoff and furious…
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I beg your pardon? The restoration costs exactly £0. God forbid if we asked you to pay us to restore YOUR data. We’re not a hosted backup solution that charges you for data storage and restoration. You own your own data and I’d be damned if restoring it was not possible – let alone that if you read the other reviews here you’ll see that these people actually restored their sites. You just need to use the free of charge Akeeba Kickstart software exactly as explained in the step by step video tutorial which is also available free of charge and linked to from inside the Manage Backups page of our software.
Also, three weeks ago we made a new version of Akeeba Kickstart available which makes restoration EVEN EASIER. Here’s the “difficult” steps you need to restore your site:
1. Download Akeeba Kickstart
2. Extract Akeeba Kickstart’s ZIP file and upload the kickstart.php to your site’s root
3. Visit its URL, e.g. http://www.example.com/kickstart.php
4. Navigate to the folder where you’ve stored your backups. Note that this is not pinned to a specific directory because a. the plugin’s directory name can be whatever you please and b. you can (and should have, assuming you read our documentation) change the backup output directory to a location of your liking.
5. Pick the backup archive you want to restore.
6. Click Start and sit back
7. Click Run The Installation
8. Pretty much click next until its done, unless you want to customise something during the restoration
9. Click Clean UpIf you do pay for the €40 version (that’s about £28) you get to replace steps 1-4 with selecting the backup record, i.e. you just don’t have to upload Kickstart and pick the directory. I don’t think that uploading a file and picking a directory is so demanding a task that guarantees a one star rating for the software.
Alternatively, you can do this:
1. Download the archive
2. Extract it with out FREE OF CHARGE Akeeba eXtract Wizard desktop software available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
3. Upload all extracted files – or just the installation directory if you only want to restore your database
4. Visit http://www.example.com/installation/index.php where http://www.example.com is the URL to your blog
5. Follow the on-screen instructions, i.e. pretty much clicking on Next until it’s doneAgain, a very simply approach which doesn’t even mandate that the backup software is installed on the target server. Even if you completely screw up your site and have absolutely no way to log in to it you can STILL restore it. That’s the whole point of Akeeba Backup. Unlike other backup solutions it can restore a site from the dead without having to learn an entirely new process to restore your site. I think you’d agree that you’re most likely in need to restore your site when it’s completely dead, so here’s that.
As for the time to backup your site it depends on the size of your site and the speed of your server. On a fairly run of the mill shared hosting provider (Rochen) and a fairly small site (10Mb compressed) it takes 15 seconds flat. A site twenty times this size (300Mb compressed) took less than 4 minutes to back up. If your site takes hours and it’s smaller than several Gb big then may I respectfully suggest that you are in dire need of a better hosting provider.
This dude never changed his star rating? I don’t know why I’m still shocked by people.
That’s why I delisted the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory. When I contacted the directory team about this kind of obviously false reviews I was told, word for word, that “whether a plugin is free or not is the subjective user experience”. For this reason they wouldn’t remove these blatantly false reviews.
I even pointed out to them two cases where the user account was created minutes before filing two nearly identical negative reviews for two backup products (mine and another one) and right after that a very generic five star review for a competitive product. I was told very rudely that they know better than me to spot fake reviews.
It’s worth noting that you cannot list a paid plugin in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Therefore reviews claiming a plugin is paid can reasonably only have one of two results: a. the plugin is a fraud and must be removed from the directory; or b. the review is a blatant fake, it must be removed and the user who filed it blocked. Concluding that the plugin isn’t fake, the review is and doing nothing is amateurism at its finest.
Another display of gross amateurism by the WordPress Plugin Directory team is that delisting an extension doesn’t really delist the extension. It merely hides it from search results and blocks the developer from the SVN repository. If you have the URL you can still access the –now outdated– page. Google does have that URL, obviously, and won’t remove it since it still returns an HTTP 200 response and content! Any past reviews are still visible as part of the WordPress forum. Basically, any lies written by malicious, fake users remain forever and the developer can never get any redress from WordPress.
If you have the URL you can still access the –now outdated– page
This is false. You can access the plugin page, as the author. We can access it, as the administrators. Other users cannot access it. Google cannot access it. Try it yourself. Log out, and try to see that “hidden” plugin.
Reviews and other posts in the forum do remain, as they are not the plugin page.
Furthermore, these reviews are not “false”. You remain just as confused about the issue now as you were 10 months ago. A “false” review, in our eyes, is one made in bad faith. But a review made by somebody who simply misunderstands the product or the service involved is not false, because it is their actual experience.
You offer a method to charge for your other services. There’s nothing wrong with that, by itself. However, you don’t make that abundantly clear. People have downloaded your plugin and then found that it would cost them money to do what they wanted to do, or at least they *thought* it would cost them money. That is why they left you bad reviews.
You compare this to the Joomla extensions system, where they do remove such reviews. We do not remove them because they are *real* reviews left by *real* people who are either confused by the plugin, the documentation, the workflow… something about the process. Not everybody is a software engineer. Not everybody is a programmer, or a system administrator. The opinions of normal, non-technical, people are valuable too. We don’t discount their experiences. While you say it’s “false” that you require money, and we agree, that does not make the experience that somebody has using your plugin to be a “false” experience. Experience is subjective, and reviews are subjective as well.
The plugin was removed because you asked us to remove it, and you did so because you are seemingly unable to handle criticism in a rational and reasonable manner. Your over the top response to these reviews, as demonstrated above, shows that you have a poor ability to react to criticism from non-technical people. Being a part of a community takes more than technical know-how. It takes people skills. Being irrationally angry at somebody who got confused by your code doesn’t make a lot of sense, and it’s no wonder that the original reviewer never came back after the harsh language you used.
So, here’s my advice: Not everybody is on your level. Learn to deal with other people like a human being, instead of simply getting angry at their stupidity. There is always some real person on the other end of the keyboard. Treat them as such.
Thank you for the feedback.
Regarding the plugin page, I had checked soon after you told me it was unpublished and the notice wasn’t there (caching?). Now I can see it is. I apologize.
I still don’t understand why the reviews link in the (unpublished) plugin page is unclickable but the reviews themselves are available on the forum. It would stand to reason that once you unpublish a plugin all of the reviews and support requests are unpublished too.
Regarding the review, I consider any review that is contrary to objective reality to be false and I’m glad you agree. However, if you do not weed out lies like this it is very easy for developers to attack competitors and you’ll be none the wiser. I could just pay 10 Euros to random people with a WordPress.org account to write negative reviews filled with lies for competitors’ products. Falsehoods also “poison the well” for future users. No offense, but you should read some introductory books on behavioral psychology and neuroscience before you manage user reviews.
Also, about your assumptions. I do not assume that users –or you– are on the same technical level as me. If that was the case my software would not have a reason to exist. I’ve been developing backup software for ten years. I know exactly how inexperienced users are. I have a serious company, four strong, we do randomized user testing with an external UX company and we do take user feedback very seriously.
Regarding community spirit, you can look at the support requests I received and replied to. I tried to help people, for free, and even provided them with direct support on their own site. I even fixed issues that were not problems in my software.
What I got in return for my hard work was false reviews and a “screw you” by the directory. So please don’t lecture me on community spirit. Developers put all this time to make WordPress more useful to more people. What they expect in return is WordPress to protect them against the inevitable irrational people. Instead, you condone irrationality in user comments and talk down developers who protest that.
Speaking of which, you claim that my reply to that review was “over the top”. Someone openly attacked my professional ethos by accusing me that I hold their data ransom. That’s a blatant lie which, were it true, would make me a crook and possibly raise questions on legal action as you are very well aware. I had to make it abundantly clear that this is absolutely not the case if not for defending my professional ethos then certainly for legal reasons. I don’t consider it “rational” or “people skills” to accept unfounded accusations on my professional ethos. Apparently neither do you because you did send me an over the top reply with a bit of ad hominem attacks at the end when I insulted your professional ethos regarding your involvement in the WordPress plugin directory.
So, here’s my advice: Not all users are always right. Learn to deal with blatant lies like you should, instead of simply condoning their toxic behavior. There is always some real person on the other end of the plugin listing. Treat them as such.
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