[Plugin: Online Backup for WordPress] Backup Failed – Issue with 3rd Party Plugin?

Hi carrimd,

We can get someone to check the server logs for your account to see what it is we are receiving from you, and this generally tells us where to look for the problem.

So can you email your username for https://wordpress.backup-technology.com/ to support “at” backup-technology.co.uk, and then we’ll update the topic, or reply to you, with what to do next. Make sure to include the word “WordPress” in the subject.

Thanks,

Jason.

Hi Jason,

I e-mailed you our username (Number4Hair) on July 26 so that you could check the server logs for our account in the hopes of getting this plug-in up and running. Have you had a chance to do this?

Thanks!

Hi carrimd,

Apologies for the delay.

Do the backups always fail? Or do they sometimes work? From what I can see it works on occasion but then other times we get some strange chunks of empty data that cause the junk error.

There has been some server maintenance happening earlier this week though and maybe this has addressed some of the issues. Try running a backup or two and see how it goes, let me know if there is still an issue and I’ll get some more investigations done into the empty bits.

Jason.

Jason,

The backups do not always fail. They do sometimes work, but not on a regular basis. For example, they were successful July 30 – August 4, then they failed August 5 – 8, then they were successful again August 9 – 10, and now they are failing again (or, at least they have been for the past two days). Are you still conducting server maintenance? If so, when will this maintenance be complete and can I expect the backups to consistently run successfully after this maintenance is complete? I need a reliable backup tool. Thanks for any help you can provide!

Carrie

Hi Carrie,

The maintenance was completed. I’ll have the logs checked again since it clearly hasn’t affected your issue. I’ll update you soon as I can.

Jason.

Thanks! I appreciate it. Keep me posted.

Carrie

Hi Carrie,

Some more tracing is in place at the moment to try locate the problem, and some maintenance happened again yesterday with some improvements.

We’ll keep watching for this issue. If we don’t see much improvement we’ll let you know and we can get a trace version of the plugin over to you to see what’s happening at the WordPress side of things, if you are still using the plugin.

Thanks,

Jason.

Thanks for your help, Jason. I noticed that the backups were succeeding from Aug. 15-21 – the longest successful stretch yet – but then it failed again last night:-( It seems like some progress is being made though. Keep me posted!

Hi Carrie,

Good to know!

Unlike the previous errors, we aren’t seeing this latest one on our side. Lots of improvements going on behind the scenes over here which has meant the problem you WERE experiencing should be all fixed now. But this one might be different.

Can you let me know the actual Completion status of the failed backup, and copy and paste in the Events for it? It might be something slightly different.

Thanks,

Jason

Hmm…the backup was successful last night (yeah!!) with only one warning: Table ‘wp_cf7dbplugin_submits’ has no PRIMARY or UNIQUE key! Backup of this table may be inconsistent; some rows could get missed. See FAQ for more information.

The backup from the night before, though, failed. Here were the events that occured during it, in order from first to last:

Info: Backup starting…

Warning: Table ‘wp_cf7dbplugin_submits’ has no PRIMARY or UNIQUE key! Backup of this table may be inconsistent; some rows could get missed. See FAQ for more information.

Info: Initialisation completed.

Info: Database backup completed.

Info: Folder /content/wp-content/plugins/wponlinebackup/tmp was excluded. (Online Backup for WordPress temporary backup directory)

Info: File system scan completed.

Info: File collection completed.

Info: Deleted files processing completed.

Error: Error The backup failed: The server attempted to retrieve the data, but received junk from your blog. This can happen if your blog is not accessible over the internet. Otherwise, you may have a third-party plugin installed that is changing the backup data as the server tries to receive it. Please contact support if this is the case so we may improve compatibility.

I hope this helps with your investigation into our issues.

Thanks!

Hi carrimd,

What time was the error? And what timezone is the time in if you know? (We’re BST – GMT+1 at the moment)

I wonder if it is just a one-off and fixed itself as I couldn’t see anything immediately. But if it’s happened again, we’ll need to keeping looking into it. Given the time we can check more easily for the errors.

Thanks.

Jason

Hi Jason.

We’ve had one failure (Aug. 26) since I last posted; the error occurred at 12:07.08. The events and error for the failed backup were the same as what I posted before for the Aug. 22 failure, but that error occurred at 12:00.50.

I’m in the Pacific Daylight Time zone (UTC-7 or GMT-7).

I hope this helps! Thanks!

Carrie

This issue is listed as “Resolved,” but it is not. The last two nights’ backups have failed and the latest failed backup has a new error message than before:

Error #1: A filesystem operation failed while processing ‘Database/OBFW_Database.sql’ for backup.
If the following error message is not clear as to the problem and the issue persists, please contact support providing the complete event log for the activity. Diagnostic information follows:

Failed at: 314(/mnt/stor9-wc1-dfw1/653452/www.number4hair.com/web/content/wp-content/plugins/wponlinebackup/include/tables.php)
An error happened at: compressor_deflate.php(410)
filesize() [function.filesize]: stat failed for /tmp/obfwmARzSq

Error #2: The backup failed: A filesystem operation failed.

Are you still looking into this issue? Any help that you can provide is greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Yo Jason… Carrie’s experience with this plugin is not very encouraging. I’m looking for a paid service for backups and security and I’m not impressed.

Hi carrimd,

The error you posted last is a rare problem we’ve seen on some servers, due to the way the server is setup. We’re testing some alternatives to using the tmp directory at the moment but no time scale on it. In all cases with that error it was usually a one-off or occurring irregularly depending on how the server is configured. (We think some hosts are heavy on emptying /tmp.)

The one from Aug 26th, we’ve found the problem there. Sundays are a very busy time for us as a lot of people have backups set to weekly, and we’ve now found that due to the high load at these times, sometimes, a small percentage of backups fail. Work is underway at the moment to build some servers and improve server performance and monitoring. Scheduling a backup so it doesn’t run during Sunday morning to Sunday evening will fix errors for now.

Regards,

Jason