[Plugin: WordPress Backup to Dropbox] Backup has not completed for 2 weeks

Quick update – just ran it manually again. It did update a few items according to Dropbox, but after reaching the ‘Processed 990 files’ mark has done nothing now for 10 minutes…

Are any files getting to Dropbox?

FIY the plugin relies on WP cron that kicks off tasks when people access your blog (either admin or otherwise) so if your traffic is very low this will affect the start of the backup.

Yes – when I ran it after the WordPress update yesterday it copied lots of system files to Dropbox, but it seems to give up or get ridiculously slow after around 1100 files, before it ever gets to the database. It ran automatically at 1am this morning – it is still running nearly 6 hours later: this is the current status:

06:42:55: Backing up WordPress path at (/home/p/o/popularscience/public_html/blog/)

06:45:16: Processed 1123 files.

Traffic isn’t very low – I get around 200 visitors a day.

I don’t know if it helps, but is it Backup to Dropbox that produces the ‘X-backup.sql’ file in wp-content/backups in the actual WordPress directory, rather than on Dropbox? This does seem to have updated – it’s much bigger than the version on Dropbox and claim to have been updated today.

Do you get the same issues with version 1.1?

Yes. The only difference is that with V1.1, instead of grinding to a halt on ‘Backing up WordPress path’ it runs out of steam on an entry like:

09:24:23: Creating SQL backup

(This is 8 hours after the backup started.)

I have been monitoring the popularscience-backup.sql file in wp-content/backups which I presume is where it stores the dump while it is working through the database. This shoots up to around 8Mb quite quickly and then just gets slower and slower, so in an hour it might go from, say, 8,490,031 to 8,494, 578. I don’t know how big a full dump is, but it usually doesn’t see to get much past this, while the biggest file I’ve had to date was 9.3 Mb.

The last time it got far enough to copy one to Dropbox was May 31, but back then the dump was only around 4Mb as a lot of content has been added since.

What is your php memory limit set to?
What WordPress plugins do you have installed?
How many DB tables are in you database?

What is your php memory limit set to?
What WordPress plugins do you have installed?
How many DB tables are in you database?

php memory limit – 20M

Plugins – Akismet, All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, Jetpack, List category posts, Post Expirator, WordPress Backup to Dropbox

11 tables

A 20mb memory limit is very low and if you have safe mode on or the Suhosin patch activated then the plugin cannot temporary change this value to complete the backup.

A minimum memory limit of 150M is recommended.

Sorry – my fault, I was reading an old help file rather than using actual values. According to phpinfo it is actually 256 Mb.

What about the time limit?

Hi – I’m not familiar enough with php to know what this means. There are several time limits on the phpinfo, e.g. max_execution_time = 20 and max_input_time = 60

You can see the full phpinfo data here: https://www.popularscience.co.uk/phpinfo.php

Hi there,

I’ve installed yesterday dropbox plugin for wordpress.
And i started the backup, but today it still running and keep telling me:
10:47:48: Creating SQL backup.

Am I doing something wrong? Is it normal that could takes more than one day to create the backup? I have checked on dropbox.com and any file has been copied.

Could please help me to undestand how to dropbox works?

Thank you