Hello alextech,
If you temporarily disable the Wordfence plugin, does the issue persist?
I didn’t try disabling the plug-in – just the firewall, which didn’t help.
I’ll try the whole plug-in, but if the site is completely down and has to be restored, I wouldn’t be able to do that I think.
Was also told to install a .php file in the folder with the MyRepono API:
<?PHP
$api_myrepono_https = “0”;
// Connections use HTTPS protocol (1 = Yes, 2 = Critical Only, 0 = No).
$api_force_curl = “1”;
// Force usage of CURL extension if allow_url_fopen not ‘on’.
Seems to work on some sites, but not others.
?>
Hello again alex,
if your site is completely down and needs to be restored I don’t think Wordfence would be able to interfere with your backup system because Wordfence would also be down, or..?
I’m not exactly sure how MyRepono works though. I found this and this while googling. It says there to check your servers error logs. Could you do that? Error logs are usually available via your web hosts administration panel. They would probably give us some more information on why your API is unable to communicate with the myRepono system.
I guess that’s true.
I couldn’t find any error logs on any of the sites – the field’s were completely blank.
This is what MyRepono had to say: Your restoration for ‘marjoriebarstow.com’ began correctly but it appears the connections to your API began to fail, this may have occurred if your hosting provider is using a firewall which has blocked the connections due to what they consider to be an excessive number of connections
They suggested whitelisting their IP.
The people at my hosting company said they had lots of customers with back-up services (Back-up Buddy was one) having trouble with the WordFence firewall and suggested disabling the firewall before restoring and temporarily changing the .htaccess name
Right now, restoring the data bases seems to work and so I plan on just doing a manual ftp upload of the files and using MyRepono just for the databases.
I do wonder if there is anything Wordfence is doing to address the basic problem.
Hello again alextech,
we do have a bug open for issues with restoring from Back-up Buddy but those have nothing to do with the connection to Back-up Buddy. They have to do with absolute paths being used in .htaccess, .user.ini and wordfence-waf.php. We are working on that.
Have you tried whitelisting their IP? Sounds like a good idea to me. The setting is on the Wordfence “Options” page under “Whitelisted IP addresses that bypass all rules”.
Thanks for taking the time to address this. I earlier added the whitelist ip but it didn’t seem to make a difference. The one thing that clearly made a difference was this .php file which I got from MyRepono and added to the folder containing the MyRepono API:
<?PHP
$api_myrepono_https = “0”;
// Connections use HTTPS protocol (1 = Yes, 2 = Critical Only, 0 = No).
$api_force_curl = “1”;
// Force usage of CURL extension if allow_url_fopen not ‘on’.
If it helps, originally line 6 had a “0” and that did not work – but changing it to “1” made it work. I have no idea what any of that code means, maybe it can tell you something about the problem.
I tested this by staring a restore session and when the “Restoration Failed” messages started appearing, I used ftp to up-load it and there were no more failed messages. Then, when everything else was restored, I could restore the previously failed files.
So…for the moment I’m OK – if a restoration fails, I’ll use ftp to back up the files and MyRepono to restore the database. In a pinch I can manually upload the database, but it’s very time consuming.
I’m not 100% convinced this is a Wordfence issue so I would suggest if you experience the problem again, disable Wordfence temporarily and test to make sure that it’s actually Wordfence that is causing the issue. If you can verify that it IS Wordfence please do report back.
