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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.

@mattyrob, what kind of data are you looking for? Language codes? WPML stores all that in cookies: https://wpml.org/forums/topic/what-type-of-cookies-do-you-use/

Anyway, hopefully @mercedeswpml can provide authoritative answers.

@mattyrob,

Of course, I’m just a user, so I don’t understand the inner workings of WPML. However, I am curious why the format of the Language Switcher (a front-end, site-specific decision) has anything to do with how Subscribe2 multilingual functionality might work.

WPML has a pseudo-SELECT/OPTION approach; you can see it in function on this website that I run: https://test.churchinmontreal.ca (top-right corner). Actually, it is a UL/LI list, apparently formatted as a dropdown box in CSS: https://test.churchinmontreal.ca/content/plugins/sitepress-multilingual-cms/res/css/language-selector.css. I don’t know if that helps you in mapping WPML’s UL/LI format to what you would expect in a SELECT/OPTION output.

Hi Matty,

I don’t know if these links answer your question, but here’s WPML’s documentation on their language selector options and how to customize the selector:

* https://wpml.org/documentation/getting-started-guide/language-setup/language-switcher-options/

* https://wpml.org/documentation/getting-started-guide/language-setup/custom-language-switcher/

I just discovered this plugin, and I’m thrilled to see this active discussion on getting it WPML-compatible.

I’m not sure what all this might involve, but a multilingual version might be more involved. Here are a few other needs I can think of (these are real use cases in my website, not hypothetical ones):

* The e-mail notification templates would need a version of each template in each language. The WPML String Translation module can handle translations of some plugin strings, but I don’t know if it could handle Subscribe2’s template keywords. Perhaps Mercedes could shed light on this.

* Some users want multilingual notifications–that is, they want to receive posts from multiple languages, not just one language. Whereas it might make sense to use the current site language for public subscribers, registered subscribers should be given the choice of languages. Even in the digest setting, registered subscribers should be given choice of languages to receive. Thus, I suggest to revise Mercedes’ suggestion above: rather than storing just one language code per subscriber, multiple codes should be stored. However, the subscriber should pick one language as the default (for receiving e-mails).

I know this is a lot to ask from a free plugin. Regardless of whether you can implement this multilingual functionality, thanks for providing such a great plugin.

“it creates the custom post type but doesn’t help in the display”

Actually, it has shortcodes that display the types and fields produced by the plugin. If you want Views-like functionality, could you please recommend a free plugin that provides both Types-like functionality and Views-like functionality this? I sincerely would like to know about it.

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, 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.

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately, I eventually switched to another plugin. I do appreciate, though, the time you have spent to provide this free plugin.

This ALTERNATE_WP_CRON solution didn’t work for me. However, I eventually found a workaround: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/scheduled-backups-not-working.

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 had a similar problem on my site. The site is multilingual. The display problem was that the main menu in the primary language (English) was not displaying any submenus, and the same main menu in the two other languages were not displaying at all.

Eventually, I resolved the problem by disabling JavaScript Minify: W3 Total Cache | Minify | JS | uncheck the “Enable” checkbox. With just that one setting unchecked, everything worked fine for me.

Thanks, petalumapie; without your indication of Minify as the source of the problem, I wouldn’t have known where to start looking!

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

Instructions for restoration are in the Online Backup FAQ: https://wordpress.backup-technology.com/FAQ#restore. In brief, you reload the entire file system, and then create a new database and import it.

First, thanks for the great plugin!

I got locked out by enabling File Change Detection. It seems that perhaps this is a problem with low-memory shared hosting sites. (Actually, my site’s limit is 256M, so I don’t know if that is the actual problem.) I finally got back into my site by reading this thread and hacking into the database: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/how-to-disable-file-change-with-better-security-configuration-file?replies=10#post-4612036

My suggestion is this:

• Do not mark “14. Your installation is not actively looking for changed files.” as a red item in the Dashboard. It should be blue, since it is a dangerous option for many site configurations.
• In the “File Change Detection” section, please post a prominent warning that this option could lock out some sites.
• If possible, try to figure out what it is that causes some sites to lock out. I can give you my site’s system information, if necessary.

Thanks again for the great plugin!