Backup not completing (tried 3.6.3 beta)

Is the symlink exclusion something I should be able to do by using the Exclude option within the plugin? If so, it’s not working or I’ve missed something, because I’d done that already, excluding the 2 symlinks I saw, and the backup still isn’t backing up the files.

One of the symlinks is www, and that’s showing up as excluded both in the Your Site listing and in the Currently Excluded listing. However, the other symlink (the one that’s named based on this site/domain) is only listed in the Your Site listing as excluded — it’s not showing up at all in the Currently Excluded listing.

I’m thinking the symlinks need to be dealt with at the code level. I have the developers keyed in on this one and we’re working on a fix (hopefully). With the holidays coming up there might be a delay but we’ll do everything we can to ensure we get it fixed as soon as possible. In the meantime I’m going to play locally and see what we can do to get around those as well.

Thanks again for the feedback and the back-and-forth communication on this.

Kat

Any update on this? Thanks.

Hey there @bdd and anyone else dealing with the spinning wheel of doom –

I didn’t forget about you!

I also think I might have good news. We’re still trying to figure out a fix, but I have a temporary solution that has worked for several users facing the same issue. It involves the site root path, which in turn is having issues handling recursive symlinks.

Try using the following constant to tell the plugin what your actual site root path is:
>HMBKP_ROOT — This identifies the root directory that is backed up. It defaults to something like /home/xxxxxxxx/public_html/bwp.

You’ll add this line to your wp-config.php file, substituting your actual HMBKP_ROOT value:
define( 'HMBKP_ROOT', ABSPATH . 'wp/' );

Let me know if that works to resolve the spinning wheel of death for you or not, okay?

Thanks for being so very patient through this adventure!
Kat

I tried this, but not quite there yet for me. It seems like maybe this path is being set somewhere else and this addition isn’t overwriting that path, it’s appending what I add for this constant (or adding it twice)?

I put in: define( 'HMBKP_ROOT', ABSPATH . '/home/mysite/public_html/' );

And then I got a message on the BackUpWordPress screen in the dashboard area saying “Your site root path /home/mysite/public_html/home/mysite/public_html/ isn’t readable.”

Ah … my bad. I forgot that it added the absolute path as well as your path. use this instead —

define( 'HMBKP_ROOT', '/home/mysite/public_html/' );

Let me know how it goes – and sorry about that!

Kat

The spinning is still going on in the “Included Size” column. I’m waiting to see if a backup completes (it’s still trying). I’ll let you know.

I’m gonna say it didn’t help, given that it’s still running.

Well fudge.

So far this has been one of the best things we have stumbled on. We actually have a partial way to handle recursive symlinks, which seems to be your main issue. We just have to finalize the coding, test it, and get the beta set up. I’ll push and see how quickly we can try to do that.

Thanks for your feedback, and your patience!
Kat

As noted on another post, I’m running into difficulties with symlinks again — not the spinning like before, but backups aren’t completing. Has this fix been finalized yet?

Any update on this issue? I am also encountering failing file backups with the spinner spinning for all my sites on SiteGround running an SSL. I wonder if I could be encountering a related issue. My one site hosted elsewhere (6GB) backed up without incident.