MainWP “Classic” Remote Backup Extension soft failures

First: I love this system and commend Bogdan for the fine support he continues to provide.

I understand that support has been demoted or discontinued for the classic MainWP Remote Backup Extension, but I have tried some alternatives and I don’t like the restore process as much. I know some others must still be using the original MainWP backup extension, so I thought it would be helpful to post my successful troubleshooting of an issue I saw of late, beginning sometime in late 2017, I think:

I have been successfully uploading daily backups to Amazon S3 for a few years with the MainWP Remote Backup Extension. Recently, I started seeing remote backups not fail, but result in small, ~ 1.9 MB archive files that are incomplete. This was not consistent across all sites under MainWP management, and I could not identify a single parameter – for example in the child site server info – as the smoking gun. This problem occurred every day on one site whose normal backups should be just 27 MB, whereas another site was consistently generating valid, full 350 MB backups. Both sites are running on the same shared server. Neither site’s wp-config.php file has any define memory limit line added.

For the problem backups, when I watched a “run now” manual backup, progress bar 1 would take the normal time to complete, but progress bars 2 and 3 would fly through to a success notification. I could see that the complete full-sized archive was being generated on the Child site’s MainWP folder, but within the MainWP Dashboard’s Uploads folder, only the incomplete 1.9 MB file was transferred across by the “download from child site” process.

I played with the compression mode setting within MainWP>Manage Backups and ended up with .bzip, which seems to have solved the issue. Backups now take the required time, the progress bars inch across the screen, and the full backup file is uploaded to Amazon S3. In the MainWP Dashboard site, setting the archive file type to .bzip for all backups is possible by choosing the global setting within all child site backup configurations, and then setting MainWP>Settings>Global Options>Archive format to .bzip.

So, for now, the classic MainWP Remote Backup Extension is working fine again.

• This topic was modified 7 years ago by mookieville.