WP-DB Stopped Working

Is your site really big? Does it take a long time to generate the backup?

Maybe you’re running into your server’s PHP execution timelimit? I think that’s typically set at 30 or 60 seconds.

I just tried the on-demand backup on a (small) 3.2.1 site & it’s working OK for me (I know, I know… that’s no consolation!)

I have three sites. Two of them have databases under 6 MB, and those are backed up just fine.

But the big site has a database over 50 MB, and while the actual backup is completed, neither the email nor ‘save to computer’ function works. Instead, the uncompressed backup is stored online and must be retrieved via FTP.

This seems to have started happening shortly after 3.0. (I’m at 3.2.1 all around now.)

I can’t get it to work with 3.2. It does work… but only if I manually force it to backup.

Is anyone else using 3.2 getting it to run perfectly?

That sounds like my theory might be correct then. The default script execution time is usually 30 seconds. My guess is that the plugin fires off gzencode on line 1029 of wp-db-backup.php then gets killed before it finishes.

Firstly, have you tried setting MOD_EVASIVE_OVERRIDE? Looking in the instructions & the code around line 50 suggests this might help if the backup dies prematurely.

I suspect though that that’s for handling situations where the script times out during the actual creation of the backup file. If the backup file is complete then it’s perhaps more likely to be caused by the gzencode. Sticking a set_time_limit with a large time limit just before the gzencode might fix things. Either that or stick some debug around there to see if it makes it into/out of that part of the code.

I can’t really debug it myself because all my sites are small & the plugin works for me ??

Isn’t working for me either, is saving in server instead send to my email.