Scheduled Backups not Working

My WordPress site is not backing up, it says backup scheduled but they are not occurring. I have to manual back-up

kimbacaffeinate, I don’t think you’ll get an answer. They seem to have given up on Support with this plugin.

Unfortunately, I’ve had the same problem since September :-(. Specifically, daily and weekly backups used to run, but then they abruptly stopped on September 17, 2013. Manual backups and everything else continues to work beautifully.

I tried the solution offered in another thread, but it didn’t resolve my problem: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/why-are-auto-backups-not-running?replies=3. Since freedom1 is the one who posted that request, I assume that it didn’t work for you either; is that correct?

Here is my Help/Support tab info as requested in the Sticky Post:
Online Backup for WordPress Plugin Version 3.0.4
WordPress Version: 3.8 (standalone)
PHP Version: 5.2.17
Server Software: Apache
MySQL Server Version: 5.1.72-log
MySQL Client Version: 1.0; MySQL Packet Size: 10 MiB
Memory: 256M; Post: 8M; Upload: 40M; Timeout: 50000
Memory Changable: Yes; Admin Cache Size: 293.51 KiB
Status: 1 row, 23.62 KiB packet size, 303.57 KiB cache freed, 29.42 MiB memory used
Capabilities: gzdeflate php5hash DES AES128 AES192 AES256
Abnormalities Detected:
SAVEQUERIES Enabled
End of Information

I now routinely have to manually backup. If I want to have it done automatically I’ll need to find another company to move to.

I found a workaround that got my scheduled backups working again. It has a number of steps, but it’s not as difficult as it may seem, if you follow my steps carefully–it can be completed in five minutes. It is certainly worth the trouble to get this otherwise great plugin working as expected:

* I installed and activated the WP Crontrol plugin: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-crontrol/. This plugin gives fine-grained control of WP Cron events.

* This next step is not really an action; however, it is necessary to verify that the problem that this workaround addresses is your actual problem: I went to Dashboard | Tools | Crontrol. This page lists all active WP Cron events in the system. There was nothing there related to Online Backup for WordPress, even though I had a schedule supposedly in place–this is the problem in this support thread.

* Next, I went to Dashboard | Online Backup, and then clicked the Schedule tab. I clicked the “Apply Schedule” button. Since I already had a schedule programmed, what this step did was simply to save the schedule again. If you have no active schedule programmed, then you should configure your desired settings before clicking “Apply Schedule”.

* I went back to Dashboard | Tools | Crontrol. This time, a new event had been added somewhere in the middle, with Hook Name “wponlinebackup_start”. However, the Recurrence for this event was listed as “Non-repeating”. This seems to be a key part of the problem. I don’t know why it isn’t set with a recurrence value. Anyway, the workaround in the next step fixed the problem.

* For the “wponlinebackup_start” line, I clicked the “Edit” option. This brought the “wponlinebackup_start” event in WP Crontrol to the bottom of the page. I left all the options intact except that I changed the “Event schedule” to “Once Daily (1 day)”. You should set this value to whatever recurrence schedule you want (presumably the same thing you had set earlier in the Online Backup Schedule tab). Then, I clicked “Modify Cron Event ?”.

That’s it! The “wponlinebackup_start” was then listed with a “1 day” recurrence, and it has worked ever since–the backups have since run regularly on schedule. I applied this workaround on two different sites with the same problem (and with different plugin combinations), and it worked for both to enable daily backups. I hope that the plugin authors fix the problem (hopefully this WP Crontrol analysis might even help them find the root of the problem in their code), but until then, I hope this workaround helps other people with the same problem.

freedom1 and kimbacaffeinate, could you please post to say if this works for you?

I’m glad you have resolved the issue, ochado, thanks for updating us here with your workaround.

The one thing that worries me is whether by adding yet another plugin (I have a quite a few already) I could be creating fresh unrelated problems for myself. I could try it out on one of my quieter blogs I guess just to test.

I wonder if this is all because the plugin author isn’t keeping in step with the WP updated versions?

Anyhow, I’ll post back when I have something to report.

I, too, am worried about the same thing–you know you’ve got too many plugins when you install one plugin to fix another!

In any case, WP Crontrol can probably be safely deactivated once the configuration is completed. That is, once it has fixed the broken cron job, I don’t think WP Crontrol needs to remain activated. It would probably need to be reactivated only if you want to change the backup schedule. I haven’t tested this yet, but I will to make sure. This would minimize potential conflicts from having too many active plugins.

On a related side note, I noticed that Backup Technology, the producer of this plugin, changed ownership last year (https://www.backup-technology.com/about-btl/). I hope that the poor support recently doesn’t indicate that the new owners have decided to no longer spend money updating a free plugin.

I’ve tried lots of free backup plugins, and until the scheduling problem that began last September, this was by far the best I’ve tested. I’ve successfully carried out two full site restorations (for test sites) based on its backups. However, if the next version of WordPress brings about new breakages in this plugin without any sign of improved support, I might have to look for another plugin :-(. In principle, I don’t mind paying for a good plugin, but all the paid backup plugins I’ve found are outrageously priced, justified by tons of features that I don’t need. If anyone has an exception to recommend, I’ll seriously consider it.

I, too, would like to know about a free alternaitve to this plugin. It’s working for 12 of my sites, but not for at least one. And almost all of them are on the same server account.

After several weeks, I noticed that even the WP Crontrol workaround is not 100%–sometimes the process gets switched off, anyways. ??

Recently, I found another very good free backup plugin, with excellent support: UpdraftPlus https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/updraftplus/. Moreover, it has a freemium model, which means that the developer has an income stream and an incentive to maintain the plugin. However, it doesn’t meet my needs completely, especially since it does not have a flexible mechanism for excluding directories.

I’ve given up on looking for free backup solutions. I guess that backup is so non-trivial that a long-term sustainable solution needs some continuous revenues to maintain. I’ve now switched to BackupBuddy, and it’s working great so far, though it’s not free.