WP Activity log breaks scheduled backup jobs of the Backwpup plugin

Thank you for using our plugin and for reporting this @eitanc

We will be looking into this and we’ll keep you posted. Right now the support response time is a bit slow due to the holiday season. Thank you for your patience and cooperation.

Hello again, @eitanc!

Thank you for your patience on this matter!

I’ve reviewed the support topic you referenced, but I couldn’t find a direct connection between our plugin and the issue you’re reporting. According to the other topic, it looks like other random users are experiencing the same issue, and that indicates that most likely, the error is caused by something else (or maybe a recent update of the BackWup plugin, since they also mentioned they started investigating this as well, according to the topic’s latest comment).

However, if there’s anything you think we might have missed, please feel free to share any additional details that might indicate our plugin as a potential cause of this.

Here are a few steps you can take to pinpoint the issue, but before moving forward, let’s make sure you are using our latest plugin version 5.2.2. If not, please make sure you update the plugin to it’s latest version first.

1. Can you temporarily disable our plugin and check if the error still occurs? If the error still occurs, this clearly indicates that our plugin is not the culprit. Let’s confirm this first before moving forward with 2 and 3 below, which otherwise may become irrelevant.
2. If the issue stops when our plugin is disabled, do you see any specific errors in the PHP log when the backup process starts, and when our plugin is activated? Any error logs would be very helpful for further investigation (to enable WordPress debug and check for the error please check our article in regards here )
3. Are there specific steps to reproduce this issue? For example, is there a particular job configuration in the BackWPup plugin that triggers the problem?
   
   If possible, please share some screenshots of the Job configuration, along with anything you think is helpful, including your site PHP version, WP Core version and Cron setup. Just make sure to censor or hide any sensitive or compromising site information before sharing (just in case any).

Looking forward to your response and any additional details you can provide so we can assist you further!

Hi @lucianwpwhite , I think you may missed that in the post I linked to – there is a 2nd page of comments, so please look at the 2nd page, where I explain why I think it the source of the issue is your plugin.

Hello again @eitanc !

Thank you for your patience, and sorry for the inconvenience caused earlier.

I’ve thoroughly reviewed the issue again and attempted to reproduce the problem in our testing environments. While I was able to replicate it, I also noticed several fatal errors originating from the BackWPup plugin, which might be contributing to this issue. This indicates that the problem might be more complex than initially anticipated.

Here’s an excerpt of the errors encountered during testing, which occurred every time a job runs:

[08-Jan-2025 09:11:17 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function putenv() in /home/tepiniyopu5661/web/xxx/public_html/wp-content/plugins/backwpup/inc/class-job.php:1600
thrown in /home/tepiniyopu5661/web/xxx/public_html/wp-content/plugins/backwpup/inc/class-job.php on line 1600



I will also post these details on the BackWPup support forum to engage their team and hopefully receive further assistance.

Additionally, I noticed in the original ticket you referenced that other users have reported similar issues despite not having WP Activity Log installed. This strengthens the likelihood that this issue is not directly related to our plugin, but rather an inconsistent problem involving BackWPup itself, or maybe some specific cron job setups.

I plan to respond on the original ticket to provide more visibility for their developers, but in the meantime, have you tried any of the workarounds suggested by their support team? Here are two potential approaches they provided in similar cases (both grabbed from the original ticket):

• Scheduled jobs not working
• Scheduled backups stopped working

Let me know if you’ve already tried these or if further assistance is needed from my side. I’ll continue to monitor and provide updates as soon as I hear back from their team.

LATER EDIT / UPDATE:
– the fatal error above was due to my testing environment setup and I was able to solve it (was unrelated)
– I was unable to reproduce the issue again after following a few suggestions from users related to cron job setup (see original thread for more details). I suspect that the actual cron job settings/setup of the site might be the “culprit” here, however, let’s see if there are any updates from their team on this, since multiple other users are experiencing this, in various other contexts, unrelated to WP Activity Log.

Best regards,

• This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by Lucian Padureanu.