Support

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:

Hi there,
Yesterday I attempted to do a backup of my current Live 1.5.26 website and the backup failed due to the cPanel account being too full.
I logged into the cPanel account and removed all past backups that were stored there unnecessarily and attempted to run the backup again.
Now every time I attempt to run the backup it get to 78% and hangs, running between 0-20+ seconds of server response.

After leaving work yesterday with the issue, I came back in this morning for another attempt before seeking assistance and am still having the same issue, but there is now also an error message after the backup process hangs and then fails.

I know others have had this issue and I have read over their solutions, but I would like to submit my Backup Log for a correct diagnosis from you as this site is Live and is under Lockdown and all security is enabled. As it is a business/organisation website and needs to stay live, there are some restrictions as to what I can do to troubleshoot the issue - so I thought I would come here before trying anything in case I break the site doing my own troubleshooting!

It would be very much appreciated if you could get back to me and I do hope we can resolve the issue!
As I side note - I do have a backup from October 2013 (the only most recent one I have) where I can take any files from if there are some corrupted ones causing the error.
Thanks in advance!
Sarah

Sarah,

You are worried about this site being live yet both the PHP version and Joomla! version you're running are obsolete, unsupported and have known vulnerabilities. I hope that makes sense to you because it sure doesn't to me.

What error are you seeing when the backup stops? It looks like the backup itself is completed, you're getting some sort of loop when it tries to update the Administer Backups screen. If you have any post processing set up (transfer to ftp, Dropbox, S3, etc.) that is not occurring.

If your goal is to have a solid backup of this site, we need to chase the error. I would not be comfortable with this as the only backup. My paranoia has served me well over the years.

If you are planning to move this backup to a test or development server, let's try that with what we've got. I'm pretty sure the backup itself is complete. As long as we're not overwriting anything, we're not burning any bridges.

Thankyou for your reply Dale.

In regards to the site and your concerns, I understand completely - the site was built in early 2012 and at the time it was the manager of the department who built it among all of his other duties. Later that year, I came on board and we built 2 other websites for the business (using J2.5) meaning there was no time to upgrade the 1.5 site.
I myself (being brought on as the Trainee for web development), then spent most of 2013 building a 2.5 replica of the now unsupported Joomla 1.5 site and in that time unfortunately, the manager's (and my mentor) position was made redundant.
So with only 17 months experience in Joomla (and web development on the whole) I am on my own.
I am now less than 3 weeks away from the "go-live" for the 2.5 version of the site, but I need to keep the old one running as backup for a period of time after the change is made in case of any issues.

Back to the issue:
I have attached a screenshot of the error I received yesterday and as far as I'm aware, there are no post processes occurring.
I agree with you, I would much prefer to have a solid backup!

I do have a (touchwood) fully functioning backup of the site from October, as I said in my last post.
I can deploy this backup and to a test server if we discover something corrupt may be causing the issue.
I can test putting the corrupt file from the live site into the freshly deployed October backup site and see if the backups start failing.
If they do, I will have a safe working copy of the file that I can copy into my current site...
If any of that makes sense... :)

Is there any more information you need?
Thanks for your help so far!
Sarah

Sarah,

I'm glad you are aware of the risks of running the old software. Believe it or not, some of our clients really are not. We'll try to get you a backup while we're waiting for the new site to go live.

I was looking at some of the troubleshooting tips for that type of error and noticed that the backup starts to go bad at exactly six minutes. Whenever we see exactly <insert even number of minutes here> we have to look at the host. Please check with them to see if they are killing your backup job after six minutes. It is not a PHP timeout, it looks like the job itself is killed at that point. Hosts will frequently lie about the existence of these hidden limits. If they do admit having a job limit, ask them for a little more time.

If we don't get anywhere with the host, we need to speed up the backup just a little bit. You might exclude your downloads folder from the backup (and FTP it to a local machine manually for safekeeping). That's a little messy, but it could work. We may also be able to run the backup at a non-peak time for server usage, that may speed it up just enough. We don't need much.

Ultimately, Akeeba does not make it possible to back up your site, it just makes it easier. There are two components to your site, the files and the database. If you FTP all the files to a local machine and dump and download your database (through phpMyAdmin or a similar tool) you have a backup.

Hi again Dale,

I jumped ahead of your first suggestion and attempted to take a backup by exlcuding my jDownloads directory.
I'm on my second attempt to backup and it's stuck on 78% again.
The first I tried took a few minutes to get to 78%... The second one that is running at the moment took less than a minute to get to 78% and is now stuck.

I have never had an issue with backups for this site before and the issue only arose yesterday after getting the error message in regards to not having enough space on the server.
As I said, I logged into cPanel and removed all old unecessary backup files and attempted the backup again and here we are.
I am going to download a copy of my downloads directory overnight (it's over 1GB in size) via FTP so I can have a seperate copy of them incase we can get the "smaller" backup to work.

I will attempt to log a support ticket with our Host tomorrow when I get in to work and see what they have to say.
If they do not come up with anything - I wll attempt to take a backup outside of work hours tomorrow night and hope there is not much usage on the external Host server.

Again, thankyou for all your help so far and I wll report back as soon as I have a result from the Hosting company!
Sarah