backup never completes

after a few hours.. I finally received this message:

A timeout occurred during backup (large files and slow servers are the common cause of this); trying again…

I for one got to the end of the backup but when I downloaded it there were tons of files missing.

Don’t know why!

mine completed… took about 5 hours for 200Mb. It’s encrypted.. but as far as I can tell looks ok in terms of size.

Hi magician11,

Was there any errors in the event log? If it encountered a problem and managed to recover and eventually finish, it sometimes puts an error or warning in the event log. So it is a good place to start to find the problem.

cretzzzu3000: Are there any errors in the event log? If files were skipped there will be. Also check there are no excludes ticked in General Settings. Might be best to raise a new topic if you want to look at the problem as it’s different to magician11’s issue and it might get confusing running two issues in same topic.

Thanks,

Jason

Hi Jason,

Thanks for responding. This is what I see in the event log:

Activity ID: 2
Activity Type: Manual Backup
Settings: Downloaded, Compressed, Encrypted

Completion: Successful

Backup Size: 212.25 MiB (3514 files)
Total Size: 232.51 MiB (3514 files)

Start Time: 10th Jan 2013 12.44.25 PM
End Time: 10th Jan 2013 6.10.16 PM

10th Jan 2013 6.10.16 PM Information Backup complete.
10th Jan 2013 1.39.29 PM Information File system backup completed.
10th Jan 2013 1.39.29 PM Information Folder /public_html/admin was excluded: Custom exclude
10th Jan 2013 1.39.08 PM Information Folder /public_html/wp-content/plugins/wponlinebackup/tmp was excluded: Online Backup for WordPress temporary backup directory
10th Jan 2013 12.44.30 PM Information Folder /public_html/dev was excluded: Custom exclude
10th Jan 2013 12.44.29 PM Information Database backup completed.
10th Jan 2013 12.44.27 PM Information Initialisation completed.
10th Jan 2013 12.44.27 PM Information Backup starting…

So no errors as far as I can see.

Hi magician11,

Thanks. So it’s not anything simple. Are you OK to install a trace version of our plugin? It creates a log file for us.

You can download a version 2.2.16 trace version here:
https://wordpress.backup-technology.com/wponlinebackup-472-tracing.zip

You’ll need to uninstall the plugin you have installed (you’ll lose your settings so remember to write down any encryption keys!) Then you’ll need to upload this tracing one and activate it.

Once you’ve set it up again, try running some backups and reproduce your issue. A trace.log file will appear in your FTP folders at /wp-content/plugins/wponlinebackup-472-tracing/trace.log. Please download this file, compress it (Windows, right-click Send To -> Compressed ZIP File, Mac, right-click Compress), then email it to support “at” backup-technology.co.uk and put a link to this topic in the email message too so we know who sent it.

After we receive it we can work out what is causing your problems and see if we need to make some adjustments to our plugin or if there are some configuration adjustments we can make such as memory usage.

Regards,

Jason

Thanks Jason. I’ll install it, run it and send you a zip of the trace log.

I appreciate the support.

Hi magician11,

Did you send the trace log? I think I received it but the backup was successful so not sure what the issue was.

If you still have issues with 2.2.18 let me know we can do another trace, but we’d need to see a failure.

Jason

Hi Jason,

Yes, I did send the trace log and you’re right it was successful.. it just took over 7 hours to complete though. Other systems I’ve tried take around 20seconds to zip up the same content to a backup.

That long time just doesn’t seem right.. does it to you?

Hi magician11,

I examined the logs a bit more closer and you’re quite right it is quite a long time. I looked further into it and seems there is some backups getting backed up.

I think if you exclude folders similiar to the following you would cease to have issue with the backup running for a long time:
dev/wp-content/infinitewp/backups/
dev/wp-content/backup-eyUpg4VEv8g4/

Those look to be backup locations and contain very large files. What is happening is the script is processing a large file, but isn’t able to handle it in less than the 3 minutes maximum we set. If we obeyed your timeout of 15 minutes it would mean if a memory problem occurred and backup stopped, it wouldn’t resume for 15 minutes, so we stick to the 3.

I’m not sure what the other systems are backing up but it must be skipping those folders maybe and only taking specific WordPress components, maybe even just the database, as 20 seconds seems a bit too quick been as our script in the log has taken more than that time on one single file in one of those folders.

See if excluding those locations will work for you. Meanwhile, we’ve been working on progressive backup for large files and better handling of detecting the 3 minute mid-way through file processing, which would work around all this issue you are having. But this is not due for a while.

Regards,

Jason

Hi!

I have the same problem: My backup never surpasses the 75%. Can you please help me?

I think the problematic folder in my case seems to be:
/htdocs/wp-content/uploads/wpcf7_captcha
As it needs hours to process all the files, yet never finishes…

I tried adding this folder in my exclude list, but it still tries to back up this folder. How do I exclude the folder correctly?

Greetings,
Vanesa

Update:
I managed to exclude the

wp-content/uploads/wpcf7_captcha

But it still gives me this error:
A timeout occurred during backup (large files and slow servers are the common cause of this); trying again…

Which I don’t understand, since there aren’t any large files.

What can I do?

The last file it tries to backup is:
Backed up file /htdocs/wp-config-sample.php at 84%

And then it gets a timeout error.

Hi bikeboutique,

One thing to try is disable a few other plugins. Sometimes there are other plugins that use a lot of memory and the backup just doesn’t have enough memory to finish cleanly.

Failing that I can give you a link to a diagnostic version that will help pinpoint the problem and also help us improve the plugin in future versions.

Jason

Hi,

I have already deactivated the other plugins, except for the contact Form one, yet the backup still didn’t complete.

Please send me the link to the diagnostic.

Thank you