backup and recovery

I yet to find a good way to backup dolphin and a restore option that actually works....

Any sugguestions.

If your host provides cpanel it should have a full backup and restore feature.

yeah they do but the backup never really restore the site back to the way it was before...

usually full of error or not operational at all

Most likely just the permissions are not getting restored. It should be a simple matter to correct that once the restore is done just by simply fixing the permissions.