Awkwardness setting up UpdraftPlus/Dropbox

  • Resolved richbhanover

    (@richbhanover)


    12 years, 9 months ago

    UpdraftPlus is brilliant! I like it a lot. I have everything working now, but I want to relate some difficulties I ran into setting up UltradraftPlus on my Ubuntu server.

    The problem I’m reporting is that error messages (which are very clear) didn’t go away immediately after I had fixed the problem. It occurred in a few places:

    1) I am running Ubuntu 10.04 on a minimal server. The plugin installed exactly as expected, and I hit Backup Now a couple times and it did a bunch of something. (I had “None” selected for the “remote storage”, so I’m not sure where the data went. Someplace on the local disk, I presume.)

    Not to be deterred, I forged ahead.

    2) When I went to set up Dropbox, I got the message that neither curl nor mcrypt were installed. That’s true. A minute’s Googling, and a little apt-get and a restart of Apache and Presto! they were installed. But… Several refreshes of the UpdraftPlus plugin GUI in WordPress still showed that neither curl nor mcrypt were installed.

    Not to be deterred, I forged ahead.

    3) I then went back to Dropbox configuration. I saved the settings (with Dropbox selected) then came back and it said “You’re not connected…” I followed the (excellent) process, authenticated with Dropbox, and then got back to the UpdraftPlus GUI. The top half of the page said, “You do not appear to be authenticiated with Dropbox” while the bottom half (of the very same page) said, “You appear to be already authenticated.”

    Not to be deterred, I forged ahead.

    I hit “Backup Now”, and the magic started happening. Files began to arrive in my Dropbox folder, and I smiled.

    But the UpdraftPlus web GUI still said that I wasn’t authenticated. Some time later (perhaps after the Dropbox backup was completely done?) I refreshed the page and the warning was no longer there.

    So: the problem is that the web GUI doesn’t quite reflect the actual state of the software (whether curl/mcrypt are installed, whether Dropbox is authenticated). It caused me to struggle a bit, trying to figure out what else to do to make the error go away. (I guess I just had to wait?)

    In any event, I’m happy now, it’s working fine (at least, I believe it is… I need to try a restore before I can say that with certainty.)

    Best regards,

    Rich Brown
    Hanover, NH USA

    Here’s my server info from the log file:

    0000.000 () Opened log file at time: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 12:33:19 +0000
    0000.001 () UpdraftPlus: 1.6.46 WP: 3.6 PHP: 5.3.2-1ubuntu4.20 (Linux ipv6-richb 2.6.32-042stab075.2 #1 SMP Tue Mar 5 15:21:53 MSK 2013 i686) MySQL: 5.1.66-0ubuntu0.10.04.1 Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu) safe_mode: 0 max_execution_time: 900 memory_limit: 256M ZipArchive::addFile : Y

    http://wordpress.org/plugins/updraftplus/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author David Anderson / Team Updraft

    (@davidanderson)

    12 years, 9 months ago

    Hi Richard,

    Thank you for the kind words!

    The errors shown at the top from the last backup run remain until a fresh backup run is started and completes – they don’t vanish immediately as soon as you correct the cause of the error.

    David

    Thread Starter richbhanover

    (@richbhanover)

    12 years, 9 months ago

    Hi David,

    Thanks for the speedy response. You wrote:

    The errors shown at the top from the last backup run remain until a fresh backup run is started and completes – they don’t vanish immediately as soon as you correct the cause of the error.

    Ahah – that is completely consistent with the symptoms I saw.

    It didn’t occur to me to re-run the backup (since the error messages made me think that it wouldn’t work, anyway.) Would it be possible to add a “Check again” link/control to those error messages that causes UpdraftPlus to re-run the tests?

    In any event, thanks again!

    Rich

    Plugin Author David Anderson / Team Updraft

    (@davidanderson)

    12 years, 9 months ago

    Hi Richard,

    I understand where you’re coming from, but internally it’s not quite like that… by the time that the messages are displayed under the heading “Last backup:”, all that the UpdraftPlus dashboard knows is that “here’s a list of messages”. Exactly where they came from within that backup job or what caused them isn’t something that the dashboard knows. And, they don’t vanish until another job has completed and the dashboard considers another job as the “last one”.

    I am planning to look at this when I get time to see how to make things clearer – because it’s not always obvious, as it wasn’t to you, that the ‘last backup job’ may be in process of being replaced by one that’s already started (but not finished).

    Hope that makes some sense!

    David

    Thread Starter richbhanover

    (@richbhanover)

    12 years, 9 months ago

    Hi David,

    Yes, your response makes sense. (That’s the struggle that plugin writers have – their software doesn’t always have access to the right hooks, nor at the right time, to give the perfect error message.)

    I’m not sure I would have read it, but I wonder if it would help to offer a hint to re-run the backup and let it complete to see if the errors go away…

    Best,

    Rich

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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