Negative time displayed

That’s not a bug – it is telling you when the time registered for the resumption in your WP scheduler is. If it’s negative, then it’s in the past, meaning that your WP scheduler has not yet executed the task.

Thank you for your reply @davidanderson. I had a hunch this is what it meant but that’s not very explicit and it looks more like a bug from a user standpoint.

I had to go manually and run wp cron event run --due-now from the command line. Is there another way to run that automatically (apart from having wp-cron run properly, which I don’t have control over with the hosting platform)?

I guess I’m wondering why the plugin cannot trigger the necessary task (through an ajax request) if it knows the time is due. Or is that available in the Pro version only?

If you keep your UpdraftPlus settings page open, it will call the WP cron system every few minutes to help it with any backlog. How long that takes will depend upon how big the backlog is.

You can also call wp-cron.php automatically using a service like UptimeRobot, e.g. https://typist.tech/articles/ensure-wp-cron-runs-on-time/ .

I tried keeping the page open but that does not work. The backup only proceeds and succeeds if I run wp-cron through the cmd line. Not quite sure why.

Thanks for the tip about UptimeRobot.

If calling /wp-cron.php directly (which is what JavaScript in your browser on the UD page will do if you have it open) doesn’t work, then UptimeRobot or any other solution calling that URL won’t work either – you’d need to ask your hosting company if they’ve disabled it for some reason.