Timeout error on download backup

Update: backup of database works fine, filesystem never works – tried 5 times or more. Obviously that’s where the images are stored.
Now how come, this always breaks off after 18 minutes, why doesn’t it keep on backuping for 2 days, if necessary?
This is of no use like this….

I have the exact same problem. The timeout message occurs within seconds of starting the backup. I can backup neither the database nor the file system.
Running 2.2.18
Wordpress 3.4.2

Is anyone looking at this? It would be good to know and if so, whether there is a time scale for a fix?

It kind of annoyed me, tested another plugin (WordPress Backup to Dropbox) – but doesn’t work well either.
This tool though, gives out some error, which suggests that I have too little storage (Ram) available for the site – so I think this may be causing the issues with this plugin as well.
Apparently some providers only provide little ram – so not the webspace, I’m not an expert on this topic but anyway, raising the amount of Ram (or having less activated plugins, or similar) *might* resolve this……

Would definitely be better though, if developers would give some feedback instead of letting users guess, what may be causing certain issues – and the fact, that the plugin simply breaks off backing up after a quarter is kind of ridiculous – Imho.

Problem in my case is, WP version is quite old so a lot of well known / premium plugins won’t work – but I don’t feel like updating WP core because the layout of the site will be to pieces. I’d need some PHP programmer to adapt things in this case again….

In itself, WPB2D makes a better impression to me though

My backup doesn’t even start, within seconds the message about Timeout appears an it says trying again.

Hi,

I’ve been looking into these memory problems for some time. At the moment we can normally “adjust” our memory usage to fit so that we don’t have problems. It still seems even after some adjustments to this memory usage some users still have problems – where for others it has fully resolved the problem.

It’s exactly what Michiel says, the issue is with memory available to PHP. The Help & Support page provides this – 256MB. Increasing physical RAM won’t do anything and it’s purely this “memory_limit” in PHP of 256MB. However, I’d say this is way more than needed. We only need 8MB minimum so you can see there must be a huge amount in use!

One thing I know will resolve the problem is to deactivate poorly written plugins. There are some that appear to use up large amounts of memory regardless of the fact when we run a backup WordPress doesn’t run anything else.

The other thing I’ve seen is that when a plugin is installed it can register large amounts of options in WordPress and set them as autoload (presumedly to optimise loading of the plugin) – but when uninstalled, these options aren’t deleted. Sometimes these options are very very big. So even though the plugin was uninstalled, the options are still loading all the time and using memory.

I’ll get a test version produced in next few days and post a link in here, so that you can give it a try. I’ll attempt to provide more information on memory on Help & Support and also monitor memory usages during timeouts.

Apologies if 4 days was a long time to get a response from me. I’ve been away and with the plugin been free/non-profit I don’t have any cover. I’m normally on the forum every 2-3 days and jump on sooner for issues like this.

Regards,

Jason

Thanks for the feedback,
interesting, though not really “nice” to hear, the WP deinstaller doesn’t work properly… But good to know anyway! ??
By the way, would be great, if the tool would produce / communicate some error messages…
I’ve written to the support of my provider, whether they can raise my memory – apparently one can define + raise the amount of ram, by editing various php-files (not hard to find with google) – but I hardly think, I can simply edit this stuff just like that; as the provider probably doesn’t have unlimited physical Ram.
So I’ll probably have to buy some upgrade to the hosting package…
Or does anyone have other experiences, with this kind of matters (raise php ram without asking providers)?

Hi Michael,

WP deinstaller relies on the plugin to clean itself up since it could have put stuff anywhere. So it’s entirely down to the plugin author to remove information. Most do, but some don’t.

Try this version here:
https://wordpress.backup-technology.com/wponlinebackup-574.zip

It will handle memory issues much much better (I managed to recreate a low memory environment). It also has slight memory improvements in the database backup and filesystem backup. Last but not least, it clears all WordPress cache such as options I mentioned earlier so more memory is available.

Either it will work for you or report “Low Memory” failures.

It’s not “RAM” you need to worry about. It’s virtual memory. RAM tends to be physical. This virtual memory is configurable in php.ini as “memory_limit”. WordPress generally automatically increases this to 256M. We also report this value in the Help & Support, and as you can see for you it is in fact 256M. It’s interesting because in my test WordPress I had to drop the memory to 25M before I started getting Low Memory problems, and used memory was never more than 25M even if the limit was 256M. So it’s pretty interesting yours hits the limit of 256M!

If you can post the Help & Support from the test version after running a backup that will be useful – I added some measurements in the backup which gets output on that screen, such as used memory at start of backup and the size of WordPress cache.

Thanks,

Jason

Thanks Jason

I have tried using the new version and now am seeing the following message
The backup cannot proceed any further due to an unknown problem

It is showing 2 events but when I look at them, it shows an empty screen.

Lynne

Please can you post the Help & Support information?

Sorry – only just found it!

Online Backup for WordPress Plugin Version 2.2.18-574
WordPress Version: 3.4.2 (standalone)
PHP Version: 5.2.17
MySQL Server Version: 5.0.92
MySQL Client Version: 1.0; MySQL Packet Size: 1?MiB
Memory: 256M; Post: 64M; Upload: 64M; Timeout: 30
Memory Changable: Yes; Admin Cache Size: 145.74?KiB
Status: 1 row, 8.44?KiB packet size, 136.48?KiB cache freed, 25.45?MiB memory used
Capabilities: gzdeflate php5hash DES AES128 AES192 AES256
End of Information

Hi puffin,

I think your problem could be something that isn’t memory related.

Can you try use this version instead:
https://wordpress.backup-technology.com/wponlinebackup-577-tracing.zip
It will generate a trace.log file. You can find a link to it on the Help & Support tab at the bottom – right-click that link and Save Target As… / Save Linked File As…
Then compress the file (right-click Compress or right-click SendTo->CompressedZIP)
And email it to support “at” backup-technology.co.uk and put in the email a link to this forum post so we know who it’s from.

Jason

Just used this tracing version and it worked !! The trace.log doesn’t appear to exist.

Online Backup for WordPress Plugin Version 2.2.18-577
WordPress Version: 3.4.2 (standalone)
PHP Version: 5.2.17
MySQL Server Version: 5.0.92
MySQL Client Version: 1.0; MySQL Packet Size: 1?MiB
Memory: 256M; Post: 64M; Upload: 64M; Timeout: 30
Memory Changable: Yes; Admin Cache Size: 145.76?KiB
Status: 1 row, 19.09?KiB packet size, 125.63?KiB cache freed, 25.49?MiB memory used
Capabilities: gzdeflate php5hash DES AES128 AES192 AES256
End of Information

Hi puffin,

Try it a few times see if it will fail as changes are quite minimal so shouldn’t have fixed it lol
But the trace.log should exist at wp-content/plugins/wponlinebackup/trace.log
The red Help & Support link in the dashboard should have a link to it at the bottom underneath the box containing the text with versions and sizes

Thanks.