[Plugin: Online Backup for WordPress] Online & Email Backups Fail

Thanks. I just tried the manual-email-backup option and I got the message, but my automated backup earlier this AM (one week after the last time) did not arrive (although the activity log does indeed show it being emailed as one of the steps). Any suggestions for troubleshooting this missing email?

Hi steveportigal,

We’ve seen issues with gmail before where it didn’t like the ZIP file or the contents that is was getting sent, and so just refused to receive it. Not sure if it went to spam or anything but I got the impression it simply rejected the email.

Solutions we’ve found are encrypting the backup so gmail can’t read it, and then by default trusts it. And also sending the email to a different email account.

So try encrypting the backup and failing that, try some other email addresses at different places. The only other problem could be file size, but the plugin will refuse to send anything over 50MB (the limit we see most often on email attachments) but some places do have very low attachment limits so it could reject something lower.

Jason.

Yes, today I got an error message from Gmail saying it was rejecting the attachment

SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com [74.125.127.27]: 552-5.7.0 Our system detected an illegal attachment on your message. Please
552-5.7.0 visit https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6590 to
552 5.7.0 review our attachment guidelines. m7si11599826wfe.24

That link says
Which file types can I not send or receive?

“ade”, “adp”, “bat”, “chm”, “cmd”, “com”, “cpl”, “exe”,
“hta”, “ins”, “isp”, “jse”, “lib”, “mde”, “msc”, “msp”,
“mst”, “pif”, “scr”, “sct”, “shb”, “sys”, “vb”, “vbe”,
“vbs”, “vxd”, “wsc”, “wsf”, “wsh”

Gmail won’t accept these types of files even if they are sent in a zipped (.zip, .tar, .tgz, .taz, .z, .gz, .rar) format. If this type of message is sent to your Gmail address, it is bounced back to the sender automatically.

For some reason I haven’t been receiving email backups and correct email address has been confirmed.

Please advise, thanks.

Jazzz1

Hi Jazzz,

If the backup is successfully sending the email, it may be getting caught in your spam filters, or your email provider may be rejecting it due to too large attachment or because it sees potentially dangerous file types inside the backup file (such as EXE, BAT, COM, CMD etc – see steveportigal’s post above.)

Apart from the above I can’t offer much more help if the backup says the email was sent.

Kind Regards,

Jason.

My manual download backups are fine, but the following error was returned after attempting a manual online backup.

“An online request failed: The server responded with status code 500 and error code 4103: The blog URL of your WordPress installation does not appear to be valid. Please note that this plugin will only work on public websites, and not within an intranet or home network. If you believe your blog URL is correct, please contact support.”

This is probably due to the wordpress installation being in its own directory, rather than the root, and because of the way that 123-reg (my host) has the setup of wordpress installations from their free 123 apps so that they end up like “WHATEVER.com:/BLOG” rather than “WHATEVER.com/BLOG” if you are doing an installation in a directory instead of the root.

Does anyone know what can be done about this, or is the answer to find another plugin (or possibly go for an earlier version of the same plugin)?

Thanks,
Paul.

Hi yearn2earncachdotcom,

We’ll fix this server side at some point. Should be done by the weekend.

Ideally 123-reg SHOULD be omitting the colon from the URL because the port specifier is empty. But it is not a MUST though. I think the server is looking at URLs using the old standards and not the new IETF STD 66.

Sorry for the issue. We’ll post again when it’s fixed.

Jason.

That was actually pretty amazing how quickly you got that next update working. I am pleased to let everyone that is using 123-reg as their hosts know that this plugin now works perfectly, and I will be posting the same on my blog as I know that there will be many people out there looking for a way to backup their wordpress blogs.

Thanks,
Paul.

Hi,

I did forget to post, sorry! Yes, the update is done.
Thanks for the feedback ??

Jason.

Hi

Great plugin. But I can not send filesystem backup, only database alone backup to my email. Everything else works pretty fine.
Regards

… and one other thing while I′m at it…:) In General Settings in your plugin-settings, it is possible to read ones encryption key!?!? What kind of a policy justifies this thinking? I′ve never before experienced a password that shows, most certainly not that a password/encryption key just stands there whole time, open to anyone with access to my dashboard to see it. Now you could argue: “…if someone gets to your dashboard, than the damage is done already…” but that just doesn′t quite seems to be true. I could wish to have several contributors to my website whom I rather would not want to be able to restore my backup for any given reason. Do you agree? And what can I/you do about this obvious security issue?

Once again, great plugin, mostly:) Thanx
Sincerely

Hi macsam,

It might be your file system backup is too big to send via email.
What errors do you get when you try?

The encryption key is not unlike a password, but at the same time it is a little different.
If you forget your password to your WordPress dashboard you can simply request a new one – it simply grants access and that password can easily be changed.

However, the encryption key does not grant access as such – it encrypts the data – and so can not easily be changed. If you forget what it is, there is no way to recover any data encrypted by that key. To change the key for some data you would need to first decrypt the data with the old key and then use the new one, so once lost any data encrypted with it is also lost. Because of this, we show the key on the General Settings so any users who forget the key can easily remind themselves of it.

Also, the encryption key alone will not give access to anything. It only allows somebody to read the data. So without access to your email inbox containing the encrypted backup files, it is meaningless. Also data stored online on our vault is protected by an access password you choose when you signup. This gives access to your data. Your key then gives you the ability to read that data. Since we do not have the key we cannot read your data even if we tried (we never would) so it adds perfect protection to your data even though we are holding it.

So we do not see this at all as a security issue.

The argument about having access to your dashboard – the damage is done already – is quite correct. Contributors do not have access to the plugin’s dashboard – only Administrators do. And in the case of Administrators – the damage most certainly is already done – they just need to turn encryption off and run another backup.

Regards,

Jason.

Ok. I see about the encrypt.key.

here′s the fail:
Failed to send an email containing the backup file.
Failed at: /customers/e/0/b/myywebsite.xx/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wponlinebackup/include/email.php:101
PHPMailer: Could not instantiate mail function.
PHP: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated

How large can a filesystem be?

Hi macsam,

Seems a problem with your WordPress is not able to send emails.
Our plugin simply passes control to WordPress to send the email, and the error is saying it could not instantiate the mail() function. So you may need to install an email plugin that changes WordPress so it uses SMTP or something instead of the mail() function. If you do have one setup, let us know and we’ll have a look into it.

But if you respond, could you please open a new topic about it as this one is quite an old one and we’ve resurfaced it – the old participants will start getting emails lol!

Jason.

I am having the same problem getting the e-mails to come through as well. I get a successful backup, and then nothing comes via e-mail. Not even in my spam.