Hi all,
This is Terence,
I'm the author of the original BackupTool plugin.
I've checked out Andreas Wagner's version of BackupTool which utilizes the "Maxg Tar" library.
Unfortunately,
there is a major bug in Maxg Tar that can result in
corrupted tar files if file names plus namespace paths are above roughly 75 characters. This is an easy number to approach with dokuwiki, especially considering things like old revisions (attic) files that include the page name, the namespace, and a timestamp in the file name.
So this means that for now, if you use the Maxg version,
your backups will be missing files. This bug has been around since 2006, when I had tried the same thing Mr. Wagner did. This is a very frustrating bug in my opinion.
So for now
I highly suggest you not use the Maxg version of BackupTool posted here until Maxg within DokuWiki is fixed.
If you absolutely must back up your wiki but have no permissions to shell_exec or simply do not have command line tar, my suggestion would be to use manual FTP backups. (But this is your choice, of course.)
However,
I expect Mr. Wagner's version to become the new version of BackupTool once this fix is made in DokuWiki (which I'll make available through the original BackupTool site) since it is written much more elegantly than even my Maxg attempt. :-)
Here is the official bug report if you're curious:
http://bugs.splitbrain.org/index.php?do=details&task_id=1442