Very old backups retained but not listed

Hi,

It is possible that those backups are from auto backup before update as those backups are not included in the retention rule.

Incomplete backup process will also lead to backups being saved in the local server.

I would suggest you to enable the email reporting feature so you get notified for any warnings/errors from the backup.

Thanks,
Bryle

@bcrodua, I’m not sure what you mean by this:

It is possible that those backups are from auto backup before update as those backups are not included in the retention rule.

All of the backup files were created with UpdraftPlus (which I have used for more than seven years). The files I found overlapped several plugin updates, but they were all from v1.16.33 or later. I don’t know how many of them were created manually and how many were sets that ran automatically (probably some of each), but they were all from UpdraftPlus.

I don’t think any of the retained files was related to errors from the original backup process. The problem appears to relate to the automated removal of backup files that are beyond the retention interval — some of those backups weren’t removed as they should have been, and sometimes the removal was apparently only partial (e.g., deleting certain parts of an all-files backup but not others, or deleting the backup set but not the associated log). Would the email reporting feature even detect such problems?

Hi,

Plugin version 1.16.33 seems very old. Please keep the plugin updated to avoid backup issues.

Yes, the email reporting should work as it will notify you for any errors and warnings.

Thanks,
Bryle

Nono, you misunderstand: The retained backups were from over the past year, and that was the earliest version of the plugin involved. I always have the current update, and have set it to auto-update. The issue appears to have involved many different recent update versions of the plugin.

Does the email reporting warn if there’s a problem with removing old backups? It doesn’t seem like it would.

Hi,

It does not warn you about removing old backups. If the backup only fails to complete then you get an email notification.

I’m afraid you will have to manually remove the old backups from last year. There were some releases where we found some bugs just like the recent 1.16.62 version and we had to release a few weeks after a fix on version 1.16.63.

Thanks,
Bryle

I deleted them myself right away, but I’m trying to figure out why this happened so I can prevent it from recurring.

I can understand why the deletion of old backup sets might fail (I have shared hosting, so perhaps there were moments where the server didn’t have enough resources to fully complete the job), but it seemed like at several points, the UpdraftPlus plugin thought the sets had been deleted when they were not.

I just found another log file that was retained longer than it should have been for what might be a different reason. The log is an abort message:

Scheduled backup aborted – another backup of this type was apparently invoked by the WordPress scheduler only 72 seconds ago – the WordPress scheduler invoking events multiple times usually indicates a very overloaded server (or other plugins that mis-use the scheduler)

This log resulted because I had completed a manual backup operation very close to the time of the next scheduled operation, so the scheduled operation was aborted.

That’s fine and normal — I understand why it happened, it’s fine, I’m not worried about it — but it raises a question: Does the plugin have any means of clearing out old log entries from aborted operations? This log was three days older than the oldest of my current retained backup sets, so I suspect it would have just been retained indefinitely if I hadn’t accessed the Updrafts folder via FTP and removed it manually.

The plugin normally removes the log file for an old backup set when the backup set is removed, but I don’t know if it has any way of removing these abort or failure messages. Those logs aren’t shown in the plugin user interface because they aren’t backup sets, so it appears that old logs like this will just clutter up the Updraft folder indefinitely, without the user knowing they’re there.

I’m not sure if there’d be a better way to handle this (maybe by having the “scan for backup sets” function also look for log files?), but it’s something you might consider addressing in future updates.

(This still doesn’t explain the retention of some very old backup sets, but with this one, I can at least see why it’s happening.)

Hi,

Thanks for raising the issue about the log files. I will send your feedback to our development team.

Best Wishes,
Bryle