Not backing up for the last month

Hi,

To help us work out the cause of your problem, can you please send us a copy of the full backup log?
This can be found in the UpdraftPlus Existing Backups tab. The contents will be too long to post here directly, but you can use an online service such as Dropbox or Pastebin, and post the link here.

Kind Regards,
Bryle

More and more strange. I am in the “Backup/Restore” tab, scrolled down to the section “Existing Backups”, but only see two buttons beside each of my last two completed backups, “Restore” and “Delete”. Curiously, I see no “View Log” button. Yet the “View Log” button is there on other sites where I have the plugin installed. I wonder if the installation of the UpdraftPlus plugin on this particular site has somehow gotten corrupted? What do you recommend for next steps?

Hi,

There are two reasons why the “view log” button is not there.

1. the logs have been deleted from the wp-content/updraft directory of your site
2. In the backup/restore tab, you have clicked the “rescan remote storage link” and this backup is from a different site.

Can you install the free plugin WP Crontrol and take a screenshot of your Cron Events?

Hello,

I have installed the Crontrol plugin and viewed the Cron events. Too many items for a screenshot so I have exported as .csv file. File viewable at cron-events-all-2024-06-13-18.51.05.csv

Hi,

Apologies, I need a screenshot but I only need to see the top few

Hello,

No problem. I am including a link to a folder with three files. The first file is the csv I already mentioned in my previous reply. The second is a partial list of all Cron events. Note these are only from today, and only a partial list. The third file is the Cron Events filtered by the hook “UpdraftPlus”. There is only one event

UpraftPlus Troubleshooting

Hope this information helps and thank you.

Hi Roy,

Apologies for the delay over the weekend. Your Cron Events look OK

I believe your issue is related to low visitor numbers.  UpdraftPlus can only make a backup when WordPress is loaded into Memory.  This normally happens when someone visits the site. 

I would recommend setting up a number of dummy visits to the site via an external cronjob.

These are automated tasks performed by the server.

You will need to set up an automated task to visit your site (please set the cron job to visit: https://yourdomain.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron )every 1-5 minutes (This will also keep the rest of your WordPress scheduler running):

Your hosts may have a tool to set up a cronjob, or you can use an online  tool such as EasyCron

Thank you for your reply. My concern with your solution is that it would skew our google analytics visitor statistics upwards. We do have a low number of visitors overall, but we do have a small number of visitors daily. I just checked the google analytics dashboard. Over the last 90 days we had visitors every day, with the lowest number of daily visitors being 34. I would think that even one visitor would suffice for WordPress to be loaded into server memory? Unless these are repeat visitors with cached sessions?

I don’t suppose there is another solution other than the cron job solution you propose? I suspect not but thought I would reach out just in case. Thank you.

There is not an alternative I am afraid.

If you set the cron job in cpanel, you should be able to filter out internal visits in Google Analytics, please see here for a guide: https://www.digitalsuccess.us/blog/how-to-quickly-exclude-internal-visits-spam-traffic-in-google-analytics-4-ga4.html

If you use something like Easy Cron you can also filter their IP.

Apologies for the delayed response, I got busy with other matters. I’m coming back to it now and was going to implement your cron job solution today. Yet when I look at the backups tab, things have gotten stranger and stranger. When I opened this ticket/conversation 10 days ago, I had two backups over a month old, with Settings set to backup once weekly and keep only the last two backups. I have not made any changes to Settings since that time. Yet when I look today, there are 6 more backups in the last 10 days, and they are not spaced 7 days apart. And still no “View Log” buttons, probably for one of the reasons you mentioned earlier.

I wonder if it might be more efficient just to uninstall and reinstall the plugin instead of continuing to troubleshoot? The other option is for me to implement your cron job recommendation anyway and see if an automated backup fires on Wednesday as configured to do so. I’m not convinced a regular interval cron ping will solve the problem because we do have daily traffic to the site. But I’m open to trying it if you still recommend that.

Your thoughts?

This has been marked as resolved, but it is not. Please see my last post.

Hello,

Apologies for the confusion, it does sound like the rescan remote storage link has been used, resulting in extra backups displaying in the Existing backups section.

I would recommend removing any backups that you do not need from UpdraftPlus >> Existing backups and your remote storage. After this reset everything using UpdraftPlus >> Advanced Tools >> Wipe settings. Next, re-connect any remote storage locations and add your schedule again to the Settings tab.

Finally, check the datetime on the Backup / Restore tab as seen here. After the backup runs please could you share your backup log file using pastebin.com?

Yesterday I removed the extra backups, wiped settings, reconnected the remote storage location and set the schedule. The backup shows complete, although with warnings. I tried to use pastebin but the file was too large. Instead I have shared a OneDrive folder that also contains previous troubleshooting files. See log file “log.53f47fd36c58” at https://1drv.ms/f/s!AiUDlMqMDY2oiY1fIKO61sbB_vMkJA?e=3hEluj

Thank you.

Can you try running the backup without the “others” section of the backup. It looks like there might be a file permission issue with your cache

Should I be doing this in “Settings”? In “Settings”, there are already exclusion rules set for the following:

Exclude these from Others:?(the asterisk character matches zero or more characters)

backup*, *backups, backwpup*, wp-clone, snapshots