Never gets past "A backup run has been scheduled"

Hi AndyAdams,

The message “A backup run has been scheduled” has a link next to it to click that gives direction and advice in this situation.

David

Hey David,

Thanks for the quick reply!

I checked out the article, and I have a question: If my site has few visitors, does that mean the scheduled task may never complete? So if I schedule a backup, and the site only gets some visitors a few hours later, will the scheduled task be missed completely? Or will it run when the visitors come later? Thanks!

Hi Andy,

I think (from experience, and a little look at the code, but I could be wrong) that when WordPress gets the chance to run, it kicks off a maximum of one scheduled task at a time. So if you really have very few visitors, then, depending on how many scheduled tasks your site has (use the plugin WP-Crontrol to take a look – you may be surprised) it’s possible that some tasks will never get run at all. But this can’t ever really happen on a normal site, because once a site is live and linked from somewhere on the Internet, even just the search engines visiting are usually enough.

David

Thanks David,

I’ve been debugging this issue for a while, and I can’t figure it out. The only thing I can think that is happening is that the WP Cron execution script is timing out (the host has a default max_execution_time of 30 seconds).

When this happens, you’re left in nowhere-land. A nice bit of functionality might be having UpdraftPlus check to see if the task is still scheduled, and if not, and 5 mins have passed, let the user know something may have gone wrong.

In my case, I see the task get scheduled in CronTrol, then it goes away (assuming it’s being processed), and then everything halts and Updraft continues to tell me “a backup has been scheduled”.

Like I said, it’s probably the hosting (I can’t say for certain), but it’d definitely be a nice failsafe. Thanks for the great plugin regardless!

Hi Andy,

Sounds strange. But yes, it’s usually hosting companies who take deliberate steps to disable WP’s cron system. Best to just avoid such hosts.

The problem with checking to see if the task is still scheduled after 5 minutes is that you’d then be relying on WP’s scheduler running the job after to 5 minutes to help you know if WP’s scheduler was working properly!

David