Best Backup Plugin I've Seen – Some Questions for You

  • Resolved MyTeeFunny

    (@prettysickpuppycom)


    11 years, 1 month ago

    David,

    What a great plugin! I tried others and was left disappointed. I’ll be upgrading soon for the premium and upgrade(s) version.

    But on my first initial install and backup trial run of the Free version of UpdraftPlus, I got this: (“…” = lines omitted and I removed timestamps too)

    …
    ERROR: Zip failure: /*Could not create*/ uploads zip: code=-1
    An error condition has occurred for the first time on this run
    …

    Then while researching/googling the error condition to see what’s up, I finally went back to UpdraftPlus plugin settings in my Admin and saw that the backup had actually completed! Reading the updated log showed:

    …
    this backup set remains non-empty; will retain in history
    saving new backup history (sets now: 1) and finishing retain operation
    Resume backup (71b4336ac75e, 0): finish run
    errors in the uploads, so the ‘resume’ event is remaining scheduled
    …
    saving new backup history (sets now: 1) and finishing retain operation
    Resume backup (71b4336ac75e, 1): finish run
    no errors in the uploads, so the ‘resume’ event is being unscheduled
    …

    So, what I noticed about all of this was that while there maybe an error, the plugin intelligently re-crons the backup job to see if can actually complete the backup. (Kudos to you for accommodating inherent time-outs due to hosting environments, etc.!)

    So with that said, I have a dedicated server I control completely and would like to know WHAT SERVER SETTINGS for PHP, Apache, etc. (for the appropriate .conf or .ini file) that would benefit performance and/or reduce timeouts.

    I know this is an advanced topic (probably overlaps into other unrelated areas) and that hosting environments vary, but in the case of dedicated servers like my own, this would be good information to know. While I may admin my own server and do okay with it, I don’t make a living at it and not an expert by any means. I’m just not intimidated by the technology and can speak the lingo (pretty much, or at least understand what’s going on, lol).

    For those that are running low end virtualized websites, or on a VPS’d server, this info may or may not be of benefit, but yet it is educational to say the least. In my case I have a E3-1230-V2 Ivy Bridge Xeon 3.3GHz, 16GB RAM, 480GB SSD Drive with a 1TB Sata 3 Drive and I would like to squeeze everything out of it I can (not bad for $150 mo and 10TB data on 100Mb connection, lol). Well, if not squeeze out what I can, at least not to hinder myself by not optimizing Apache, PHP, etc. for best performance. If you know of a good read or article on this, I’d appreciate it, including your own thoughts and strategies.

    Perhaps you could add a section in the UpdraftPlus Readme for “Geeks, Nerds, and other Technoids” for similar information for optimizing your server’s PHP, Apache, etc. for optimal performance and reducing timeouts IF you have access to controlling or setting .conf and .ini values. If not, perhaps it’s time to Upgrade your hosting environment to meet your needs and expectations… (As suggested, add some links for good reads on optimizations if you don’t provide any yourself.)

    Just My Two Cents and Observations.

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

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

    (@davidanderson)

    11 years, 1 month ago

    Hi,

    Thanks.

    Interesting. Reading the code from where that error occurs, it indicates that there is at least one file that, when we called the PHP functions to add it to the zip, gave us back an error code. It’s not possible to say more than that – you’d need to unpack the zip and compare it with your filesystem to see if there is anything different. I’d need to add in some more logging code to get it to tell us exactly what file it was looking at when it flagged an error.

    Regarding optimum performance, basically UpdraftPlus is coded to work with whatever you give it. There’s an enormous range of different configurations out there, and so without maximum flexibility, I’ll get endless support requests! So over a period of 18 months I re-engineered it to be able to deal with nearly anything, in terms of available CPU; whenever it gets killed off, it just picks up later where it left off. 🙂 But if you want your backup to finish as quick as possible, then set the PHP ini setting max_execution_time to something high, and don’t do anything to throttle the performance of long-running processes. If you compress your database, then memory_limit also needs to be big enough to hold your uncompressed database.

    David

    Thread Starter MyTeeFunny

    (@prettysickpuppycom)

    11 years, 1 month ago

    Thanks, David. I’ll look into the PHP and Db settings you mentioned.

    I will try to figure out which file the zip error occurred on. If I can’t figure it out, I’ll let you know and I would be happy to run any debugging code you have and provide all the results.

    Next, I was wondering where backup files are stored so if I wanted to use Filezilla to download it to my PC, I would know where to look. But I didn’t find anything and suspect the backup(s) are stored in the database, and can only be downloaded via the Dashboard for the plugin.

    Again, Thanks David.

    Chris

    Plugin Author David Anderson

    (@davidanderson)

    11 years, 1 month ago

    If you choose an option other than ‘None’ under ‘Remote Storage’, then your backups can be despatched off to a remote FTP server, Google Drive, Amazon S3 or Dropbox (or email, if small enough or if your email provider doesn’t mind enormous mails). If you choose ‘None’ then they are in wp-content/updraft and you can download them from there.

    Thread Starter MyTeeFunny

    (@prettysickpuppycom)

    11 years, 1 month ago

    David, again thanks for the speedy reply.

    I did happen to locate them where you said they would be. I suspect I had needed to refresh the server listing in Filezilla after the backup completed. I thought I had… lol

    Thanks again!

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