Failure of Scheduled Backups

Hi,

Please can you provide a link to a log file for a problematic backup? (You can download it from the “Existing Backups” tab of your UpdraftPlus settings page).

It’ll be too long to paste into the forum here, but you can download it to your computer, and share it with Dropbox, or paste it in pastebin.com, or any similar service, and post the link here.

Best wishes,
David

Just a follow-up here…..

After the above problem I noticed a scheduler warning in UpDraft. I followed the suggested link and tried everything (Cron fixes, etc), and talked with my ISP, but nothing was broken and nothing had been changed.

Today, about ten minutes after I installed the latest update/version of Updraft, all of the backed-up tasks ran, including the latest scheduled backup of Updraft.

My guess, and it’s an informed guess, is that something in the previous update (2015-05-12) caused the issue, and something in the new version fixed it. What that might be I have no idea, but I thought it might be worth passing along.

Hi,

Interesting – but it can’t be that. I personally review all patches that go into each UpdraftPlus release, and nothing’s gone into any recent release (including today’s), that goes near the scheduling code. That’s been unchanged for a very long time.

Best wishes,
David

I have no basis on which to disagree.

All I can report is that only a few minutes after installing the latest version, it worked, after not working for weeks on end despite everything I tried. (I also tried removing the plugin entirely, then reinstalling what would now be the version prior to this new one, and that didn’t help either.)

Okay, I think I can finally shed some light on this….

I went through all of the suggested fixes for a scheduler problem. I talked to my ISP, and they checked cron and other stuff that I don’t understand and said everything was okay.

Updraft continued to say that my scheduler was broken, and overdue for 13 jobs. To see if it might make a difference, I started disabling plugins one at a time, and as I did so the number of overdue tasks walked down slowly from 13 to 8.

At that point I disabled all of my plugins, but Updraft still showed 6 overdue tasks. When I enabled all of my plugins in one go, however, several of them failed and I was notified that my Genesis version needed to be higher than the one I had in order to use those plugins.

Confused, I checked my Genesis theme settings, and discovered that I had turned off automatic updates off at some earlier point, meaning I was about three months behind the most recent version.

I updated Genesis, enabled all of my plugins, and instead of 13 tasks Updraft now showed only 8 overdue. I decided to wait overnight and see if the overdue tasks would run, and sure enough, this morning not only is Updraft not reporting any overdue tasks, the most recent backup ran without a hitch.

So. To your list of possible scheduler conflicts/problems, I would add: “If you use Genesis on your WordPress install, make sure that you have the most recent version.” [In WP admin, click Genesis / Theme Settings, then looked under Information.]

I don’t understand why the scheudler suddenly stopped working, then worked intermittently, but in any case it all seems to be current/functional now. At least for the past 24 hours.

So………..forty-eight hours or so after I was sure the backups were working correctly, they broke again. Because I had managed to get them working after turning off all of my plugins I decided to remove them one at a time until the scheduled backups started working again. (Specifically, I turned one plugin off and let the entire site cycle through twenty-four hours, so all scheduled tasks would run.)

After a week I can say with some confidence that the problem with your plugin occurs as a result of having WordFence installed. I also now believe that it was an update to WordFence that broke my Updraft backups, and not a problem with Updraft itself. (Updraft had been working fine until I updated several plugins, and I believe in retrospect that WordFence was one of them.)

While this is obviously not your problem per se, it would obviously be beneficial if all plugins played nice with each other, so if you know the WordFence team it might be worth running this past them. Maybe they’ve had other conflict reports, or they started doing something different with the scheduler a month or two ago. (I’ll be posting a short note about this on their support page as well.)