Support

I'm using my Dropbox Pro account as the post-processing engine for about 27 websites, and most of them either give me a warning (and some give me an error) associated with the following message in ALICE:

A post-processing engine is found, but no part size is set; this could lead to timeout issues

Set a part size inside backup profile configuration.

I cannot find any "part size" setting in the Configuration for post-processing. Where is this?

Thank you,
Ernie

Ernie,

You can find that setting in Configuration, on the Archiver Engine line, click the Configure button.

That did it!

I changed the Part and Chunk sizes to 5 MB and the Big file threshold to 10 MB and ALICE showed no errors or warnings.

I'll update all my sites with these changes and hopefully will no longer have problems with CRON backups.

Thank you,
Ernie

Ernie,

The chunk and part sizes do similar things. But they do not have to be the same value, in fact, it does't make sense for them to be the same value.

The part size should not be set to zero. It should be a maximum of 2 Gb. That's a magic number in PHP. Further explanation would get into integers vs. real numbers and gets really geeky.

The chunk size is used by several cloud storage providers. The archive is broken into the chunk size, the small chunk is uploaded to the cloud, then the chunks are reassembled into one file. All the chunking is invisible to you, you end up with the same size file on the cloud storage provider.

I tested different settings and found the following:

If I increase the Part size above 75 MB, I get the timeout error in ALICE. 75 MB seems to be the sweet spot.

I can't increase the chunk size or Big file threshold above 10 MB - the setting reverts back to 10 MB.

I'm using Dropbox V.2, and the settings above create a .jpa and .j01 file for each backup. Is there a way to get the whole backup into one .jpa file? I don't think Dropbox is considered a "cloud" storage option, so there's no "reassembly" after it's done.

Thanks,
Ernie

When you use the chunk setting, the file reassembles. When you use the part size, you get multiple files that together make up the complete backup archive.

There is no one right answer, it depends on the speed of your server, the server's connection to the cloud service,etc. When you have a combination that works, that's the right answer. It sounds like you're getting the timeout in the upload to Dropbox. Reducing the chunk size should fix that, you shouldn't have to reduce the part size.

So the .jpa and .j01-.jx parts should reassemble after uploading to Dropbox? I have the Post-Processing Chunk size for Dropbox set to 20 MB.

I'm also having a little trouble excluding files. ALICE reported a large file (a video). I used the Files and Directories Exclusion feature so that it would be excluded, but ALICE is still returning the error, identifying the same file.

Why is it still trying to back up that file when I've added it to the exclusion list? I entered it as "/media/PCC_2016.mp4" (without quotes).

Thank you,
Ernie

When you use the part size, the archive is broken into parts, jpa, j01, j02, Etc. These parts do not reassemble into a single file.

The chunk size is different. The upload process breaks the file into chunks, uploads the chunks, and reassembles them into a single file on the other end. You never see the chunks.

ALICE is pretty amazing at analyzing log files but it is not infallible. If your backup completes successfully, don't worry too much about ALICE's complaints. It isn't necessary to have a clean ALICE report to have a successful backup. In fact, ALICE sometimes gets confused if it can't find anything wrong.

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