Are all your sites on the same server? Similar site sizes? What else can you tell me about them? Any security plugins, or other ones, on all the sites affected?
Do they work just fine when you click to “run now”?
Kat
Thread Starter
clwill
(@clwill)
This is silly. Now they just worked this week… Haven’t worked forever. Maybe the recent updates, and maybe doing “run now” on them all worked? Dunno.
To answer your questions: yes, same server. Five are the same size — pretty small, two much larger. They all run badbehavior and jetpack, as far as “security” plugins, other plugins vary mostly for looks and that sort of thing. They all “run now” fine, they all run their daily runs fine, it was just “on schedule” “complete weekly” runs that didn’t work.
However, as I noted, this week they all ran (for the first time) by themselves. Spooky, must have known I was talking about them :). I’ll let you know if they don’t run next week.
Thx for the response.
I marked this as resolved, but just check back in if you have further problems 😀
Kat
Thread Starter
clwill
(@clwill)
I’ve just checked, and now none of the backups are running. Daily, weekly, nothing. And past backups have disappeared. Just updated to the very latest, reset all the schedules. We’ll see, but this is getting scary and frustrating.
Inconsistent backups usually indicate that your site might be hitting server resource limits (generally that isn’t consistent, so only when you are almost to the limit will the backups not run)
Who is your host?
Thread Starter
clwill
(@clwill)
The host is ASmallOrange. I don’t have any “resource limits” that I know of. Disk space? Not an issue, at less than 3% the quota. What other limits would you suggest I look at?
I’ve checked two of the sites, both dailies ran last night. But it appears to be flaky.
Is there any kind of logging mode I can turn on? Some kind of error handling to enable?
The developers are looking into logging in a future update (!) but we don’t have that currently. The limits I am talking about are generally not ones you’ll see. They are sometimes hard-set by the host, but if they aren’t you might be able to make some changes to your php.ini file to give the backup time and resources to run.
In your php.ini (If you’re not sure how to make changes to your php.ini, your host may have more information to help you.) try making sure the following values are set to at least these minimums. If you have a large site think of increasing them further. (Contact your host to find out if they enforce PHP or CPU max timeouts).
- memory_limit = 256M
- max_execution_time = 120
- max_input_time = 120
See what you find out and check back to let me know,
Kat
Thread Starter
clwill
(@clwill)
I’ll run a phpinfo() query to see where I am on those, but wouldn’t that prevent it from running on a “run now” or at least every time it runs unattended? My problem is that they’re erratic — running sometimes not others. For example, several of the dailies are now running successfully, but they haven’t run at other times.
Thx,
Chris
The very fact that they run erratically also backs up the theory that server resources are causing the issue. When server resources are higher, the backups will run into a limit and not complete. Those variables would impact the backup no matter when it runs.
The php.ini variables are really only a few of the things that can be changed on a server level. Your host should be able to tell you if you have, for instance, CPU limits you’re running into? Some hosts use a hard I/O limit and sites which already run many processes will be limited as a result.
I suggest working with your host to firm up any limits that could be impacting things as well.
Kat
I’m going to mark this as resolved as I think it’s down to a hosting limitation – if your investigation shows otherwise please comment back and we’ll work through more troubleshooting.
Thanks,
Kat
