Restore

Putting a backup back onto its site. It works over SSH from this computer, so it works when WordPress itself does not.

How

On the site's Backups tab, press the restore button (↺) on the row you want. The dialog says which backup and asks for a scope, then for the word RESTORE. That confirmation is deliberate: a restore replaces what is on the server.

Scope

You can restore less than a backup contains — the database only from a Full backup, for instance — but not more. The scope list only offers what the backup has.

What happens

1. The archive's checksum is verified against the manifest. A backup that does not verify stops here.
2. The archive is uploaded and extracted over the site's folder.
3. If the scope includes the database, it is imported. The database credentials the site is using now are kept — the restore never writes another site's wp-config.php credentials over yours.

The site is not taken offline first. For a busy production site, put it into maintenance mode or use Site Lock before restoring.

When WordPress is down

Because the restore runs over SSH with tar and the database tools, it does not need WordPress or its admin to be working. A site showing a white screen or a critical error can be restored the same way as a healthy one.

Restoring to a different site

That is a migration: the same mechanism, plus URL rewriting and the target's credentials preserved.

Without the app

A backup is a tar.gz and a sql.gz. Any server with tar and mysql can restore it by hand: extract the archive into the web root, import the SQL. The manifest names the table prefix.