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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#13342 Quota by age - stopped working

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
n/a
PHP version
n/a
Akeeba Backup version
n/a

Latest post by nicholas on Friday, 24 August 2012 10:44 CDT

davesage
Mandatory information about my setup:

Have I read the related troubleshooter articles above before posting (which pages?)? none on topic
Have I searched the tickets before posting? Yes
Have I read the documentation before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Joomla! version: 2.5.6
PHP version: 5.3.x
MySQL version: 5.1.x
Host: (optional, but it helps us help you)
Akeeba Backup version: 3.6.2 - but issue may have occured in presvious version

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: Please attach a ZIP file containing your Akeeba Backup log file in order for us to help you with any backup or restoration issue. If the file is over 2Mb, please upload it on your server and post a link to it.

Description of my issue:

I store my daily backups off server using ftp and have set age quotas so it keeps the past 30 days and then deletes older ones but keeping the 1st of each month. This had been working completely fine so I wasn't really looking into the ftp share too foten as I thought it was looking after itself. I have just looked and for some reason this feature seems to have stopped working, it may have co-incided when I changed my cron to use the CLI job - does this feature not work with CLI?

It seems to be leaving every days backup in place?

What is more strange is that it seems to have removed some of the older backups form the 1st of the month which is annoying.

I was expecting the CLI cron job to do the same thing as the normal wget?

This could be red hearing of course and it could be something driectly relating to the backup process but I'm not how to debug the quota setting part of this.

Any thoughts would be highly welcome,

Cheers for your time,

Dave

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
I gave it a spin on a test server, I couldn't replicate this issue. I did find a fix a few PHP notices, but they don't seem to be causing any issues (that's why they went unnoticed for so long - pun not intended). One way I could replicate it was removing a few files specific to the Professional version. Can you try reinstalling Akeeba Backup Professional, without uninstalling your existing version, and retry?

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

davesage
Hi Nichiolas,

I've done a re-install and will let you know the results.

Cheers,

Dave

davesage
Hi Again,

I've just spotted something else, I think it is removing older files BUT it isn't leaving the ones on the first of the month.

The older ones that are left behind have a different file name!

It seems as though whatever change that happened which meant the ones on the 1st were not being kept also changed the site name in the filename from site-www.domain.com to site-domain.com

Hope that gives you a further clue as to where this is coming from?

I'm still convinced it is when I moved from wget to cli in the cron task - hmmm.

Thanks again, I'll let you know if the re-install changes anything,but then I might not know until the 2nd of next month :-)

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Can you give the latest dev release a try? I tested it extensively yesterday night. It seems to not exhibit this behaviour.

BTW, the site-www.domain.com vs site-domain.com has nothing to do with quotas and is easy to explain. Try accessing your site's back-end as www.domain.com and go to Akeeba Backup. Click on Configure and click on Save & Close. Repeat once more. That's it. Also, please make sure that your configuration.php either has an empty $live_site or $live_site includes the www in the domain name before trying following these instructions.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

davesage
Hi Nicholas,

I'll install the dev release and give it a whirl.

Because it is about testing the incorrect deletion of older backups marked as a specific date can you let me know how it compares the dates? Is it in the name of the file i.e. if I copy a jps file and rename the file to be the first of the month will this test it or is it the files create date or do you reference the database records that are linked to the file?

Once I know this then I can drop some files into the remote directory looking as though they are older and produced on the first of the month, run a backup and see if it leaves the file alone.

I suppose the other way would be change the day from the first of the month to tomorrows date and then see if it leaves it alone overnight?

Thanks again,

Dave

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Hello Dave,

We never look at the file names. It isn't necessary that you use the [DATE] and [TIME] variables in the file archive naming template. Besides, it isn't necessary that all backup archives of a profile are saved on the same directory And it's not even necessary that they are saved locally on the server. For these and many many more reasons we are using a database table called #__ak_stats. It is where all backup attempts are stored. The backup_start field gives us the date of the backup.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

davesage
Hi Nicholas,

Just posting back some results of testing.

I changed the settings to test whether yesterdays files would be left alone (by setting 'don't delete backups taken on this day' to be 23)

Both the latest dev build and the current stable did the right thing and didn't delete the files.

Seems to prove that it is working as expected now.

I am left confused as to how my archive of backups on the 1st of the month spanning the past 6-12 months have been deleted?

When I look in the stats table and the 'administer backups' area (I know they are the same thing) I can see that all the entries for the 1st of the month say obsolete and the remote_filename path is empty, this would seem to indicate that Akeeba did delete the files?

Do you think this could have been some previous version issue or some upgrade error or something which has been fixed by more recent installation of a newer version or something?

I won't be able to get those backups back now but hopefully newer ones on the 1st should remain.

Cheers,

Dave

davesage
One other thing - interestingly one of my sites with Akeeba left at version 3.4.3 doesn't show the issue and all backups from the 1st remain, this would indicate an issue in the 3.5.x series or upgrade process?

I did see a white screen when upgrading to 3.5.0 and therefore did a fresh install using the installer (without uninstalling first) following your suggestion in another post about the live upgrade not handling a majoy point release well or something - a while ago now so my memory isn't too good on it.

Anyway hope this helps in your investigations.

Cheers,

Dave

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Hello Dave,

Not sure what happened. The last time I had fixed a quota issue was back in version 3.3.10. The only thing which could explain it, would be a failed upgrade. In this case leftover files, or files have not been updated, could cause a problem. Besides that possibility, I cannot explain it. Seeing your latest post, which reports upgrade issues, I tend to think that this was the case.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

davesage
I had an upgrade issue with 1 site so did the rest manually.

Oh well, one of those things, thanks for looking into it anyway. I'll ensure I take a copy of the files on a monthly basis to ensure the safety of the archive (should have done that anyway really I suppose).

Thanks again,

Dave

PS - the new styling looks good!

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Yes, keeping multiple copies of backups is of paramount importance. It's actually a rule of taking backups. Backups should never exist in one place. Ideally, they should exist in at least two different media, in different places or even different continents. The more diversity you have in storage, the more likely it is that you will have a backup to rely on.

Thank you for your kind words regarding the new styling :) I used bootstrap, in a preemptive change to get Akeeba Backup's styling in sync with Joomla! 3.0's default styling. It seems to have worked wonders!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

davesage
Yes indeed, I do have a copy of all my backups on another media if I ever needed to get them back but a little more complicated to get to than the copies that have disappeared.

Yeah some interesting stuff coming through about 3.0! Seems as though the JUX seems to be dividing people slightly - I suppose big things like that always will.

Keep up the good work,

Dave

Do close this off now if you like - I'll raise another one if this comes back.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Hi Dave,

two thumbs up for being proactive!

Regarding Joomla! 3, it is going to be a great release. I am sure about that. The more people complain about an upcoming Joomla! release the better it is. It will require a lot of work from developers as we have to shift our paradigm of content presentation and there are a LOT of APIs made obsolete in this release (not that we were not aware of that fact). The biggest PITA is the interface change because the changes are not backwards compatible with Joomla! 2.5. Unless, of course, you're using something my framework (FOF) which allows Joomla! 2.5 to use Bootstrap in the back-end without requiring a special template. I suspect that very few extensions will be available for Joomla! 3.0, many more for 3.1 and almost everything for 3.5.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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