Deactivate or delete

Deactivating and deleting are two different things. When deactivating, the plugins only clear away running schedules, transient leftovers and files that would otherwise keep working without them. On final deletion, none of the eight plugins takes anything with it out of the box — its data is only removed if you first switch on “Remove all data of this plugin when deleting it” under “Your data” in the plugin concerned.

When deactivating

• Analytics ends its five schedules: maintenance, email report, site sync, tool reports and alerts.
• Backup ends all of its own schedules, cancels a backup run that is still in progress and clears its working directory.
• Performance clears the page cache, ends the scheduled database maintenance, the refresh of the critical CSS and the cache warming, and takes its own block back out of the .htaccess. It also removes its object cache drop-in wp-content/object-cache.php; a third-party drop-in is left untouched. If removing fails, it records the reason so that you find out about it.
• Security ends its daily run and removes the schedules for the administrator check, the pattern search, the database check and the file watcher. It discards started passes of the pattern search and the database check, and the file watcher does not carry on; the most recently completed results remain. It also deletes its cache lock and removes the firewall preloader from the mu-plugins folder.
• Media removes the scheduled passes of its batch run and of the clean-up from the schedule. Findings, folders, manual decisions, alternative texts, settings and the state of passes already under way remain in place.
• Consent, SEO and Roles have no deactivation routine — with them nothing happens.

In all eight cases, settings, database tables, logs and existing backup archives remain untouched. Activating again later recreates the schedules.

When deleting

• Out of the box, deleting takes nothing with it for any of the eight plugins: tables, settings and logs stay in the database, and a later reinstallation finds them again.
• Only the “Remove all data of this plugin when deleting it” switch under “System” → “Your data” changes that, and only for the plugin in which you switch it on. Then its tables, options, schedules and its own capabilities and roles go with it.
• With it, Consent also deletes the consent log with all records of proof and its directories in the uploads, including the locally stored fonts.
• With it, Backup also deletes the backup directory with all archives — more on that in the next section.
• With it, SEO also removes titles, descriptions and the other SEO details stored on posts.
• With it, Roles removes the log, the trash, visibility rules and redirects. The roles and capabilities themselves remain, because they live in WordPress.
• With it, Media removes the findings, checksums and manual decisions on the images as well as the folders including their assignments. The images themselves and their alternative texts always stay.
• In a network, each site decides for itself: data is only cleared where the switch is set.

Deliberately deleting backup archives as well

1. Open Kakapo Backup and choose “Your data” on the left in the “System” group.
2. In the “Delete (remove plugin)” card, flip the “Remove all data of this plugin when deleting it” switch.
3. Below it, it then says “Current state: it will be deleted.”, and a warning appears under the plugin in the plugin list.
4. Only then does deleting the plugin remove options, logs, the audit chain, the schedules and the entire backup directory.

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