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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:
Backups are failing without creating the backup files when run by cron job. We are able to backup by manually initializing the backup. We have a dozen or more other Joomla sites on this server that are backing up without problems - some much bigger than this site - using the exact same configuration settings for Akeeba. So we suspect it is some local setting?

The troubleshooter says:
"Timeout while backing up
Error
There is already an issue with the backup engine saving its state. Please fix it before continuing.
Please try setting min execution time to 1, max execution time to 10 seconds (or if the PHP timeout is less than 10 seconds, use 75% of the PHP timeout), runtime bias 75%"

But those are the settings we are using.

The backup job ended abruptly at 100 seconds. That suggests that your host did it. It is not at all unusual for a host to kill a CRON job that it thinks has run too long. When the job stops suddenly at an "even" number of minutes, seconds, etc. the first thing to do is go to the host and ask if there is a time limit on a CRON job.

If there is a time limit, can it be extended?

If the host did kill it and they won't extend, we do have a Plan B, but I'm not going to go into that yet. It bothers me that most of your sites are running fine.

Hi Dale,
This is a dedicated server that we own, so I assume that we can change whatever setting is causing the time-out. But, as I said, all our other backups are running fine on the same server as this site is located. So there must be something different in the settings of this account. Can you suggest what setting may be causing this? For example max_execution_time is set to 200 on this account as well as others that do not fail.

We're a tad deeper into server configuration than I normally go, so I'm just going to give you what Nicholas told me verbatim, so I don't mess it up trying to translate.

Have him log into a terminal *as the user which will be running the CRON job*

Then run `ulimit -a`

If he has a cpu time limit, that's the problem

and

Likewise, if his backups are unwriteable after a certain size he should look at the file size (-f) ulimit.

That second one he's thinking that it may be a file size issue. When the file grows to a certain maximum size, the backup dies. Keep in mind that the command line backup uses a different PHP with potentially different settings than the back end backup. And then he shared a couple of links for server settings that we could be running into:

Also look at cgroups, http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2014/11/04/restricting-process-cpu-usage-using-nice-cpulimit-and-cgroups

Also PAM limit https://linux.die.net/man/8/pam_limits

Please keep in mind that he MIGHT be running a daemon enforcing this

See https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=992706

Hi Dale,
Here is the feedback from our sys admin:
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At present both the cpu time and file size for the user goldcoas are set to unlimited. There are no cgroup configurations nor PAM limits set on the server. Did they mention anything else which might be an issue as I am not seeing any local configurations which might be impacting these backups?
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I am also attaching three more log files. The backup completed fine on the 16th, and then failed again on the 17th and 18th. I attached all 3 of the logs.

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