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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#8640 Backup Pro suddenly makes incomplete backups

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

Joomla! version
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PHP version
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Akeeba Backup version
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Latest post by nicholas on Monday, 04 October 2010 02:11 CDT

user10589
Hi, Nicolas.

I had this problem before, but did not take notice of it then, but when i wanted to restore the backup whit the smaller file size all went wrong by restoring the database and the restore stopped whit an error telling me it could not find the database in the archive leaving me whit a mess. I had to restore an older backup using kickstart.php which give me lots of extra work to restore the latest articles.

Now on 27 September 2010 al of a sudden it started again, all backups are a lot smaller in size (no errors where reported), it doesn't matter if i use Akeeba Backup Pro from the back-end, using lazy backup or Akeeba Remote Control. I do not understand what's causing this, nothing special happened nothing was changed or installed that could interfere whit the backup process it just happened.



Can you help me out, i cant find out what causes it. I attached the latest log file, hope it's of any use to you.

grtz, Z. :(

user10773
Hello,

i´ve the exact same problem... pls help!!!
Lg
Alex

user10773
its the problem that sstemfolders are missing , as for example the installtions folder is not in the Backup zip.
Its even if I start the backup by hand and not over the plugin.
pls help
Alex

user10589
Here it happens without doing anything, no folders are missing or whatever. Before this happand i had atleast 12 backups made automaticly and whit remote backup wich where send to my PC at home.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Can you please both attach your log files?

That said, make sure that all directories have adequate permissions (e.g. 0755) so that Akeeba Backup can scan them. Files should also be readable (e.g. 0644 permissions) in order to be backed up. If you get any warnings during the backup about unreadable files/directories, fix your permissions.

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!

user7836
Hello,

i´ve the exact same problem... pls help!!!

Restore looks OK
But parts of the site are not working.
Backup Size is approx 50% of old backup size


Isaac

user10589
Can you please both attach your log files?



That said, make sure that all directories have adequate permissions (e.g. 0755) so that Akeeba Backup can scan them. Files should also be readable (e.g. 0644 permissions) in order to be backed up. If you get any warnings during the backup about unreadable files/directories, fix your permissions.

I did upload an attachment (had to archive it to .rar to make it fit) in my first post above, if you can't find it I'll upload it again in this post, and NO nothing changed no permissions, no missing directories nothing. It just happened unpredictable last week i had the same problem, it seems to happen completely random. The XMLRPC plugin is version 3.1.b2 i have an idea that this plugin is causing the problem because it doesn't matter what backup procedure i follow (Remote Backup, Backend Backup, or Lazy Backup) they all give me the same results.

Regards, Z. :)

user7836
Nicolas

I don't know if this is important
I noticed that my 'full site backup' are exactly the same size as zocor mentioned in his messages 36,1 MB. ???
I tried to backup a other site as well and the backup size is 36,1 MB again ????

It could be coincidence or maybe a clue

Isaac

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
@Zocor I can see that your host is using PHP 5.2.4. This version and PHP 5.2.5 are extremely buggy and are not supported. To put it bluntly, they are so screwed up that using any of the PHP5-specific features on them will most likely cause huge problems. Please ask your host to upgrade to the latest PHP version (5.2.14). FYI, PHP 5.2.4 was released some 3 years ago, which is an awful lot of time for a server to not have receive any updates.

@ikorpershoek Do you also have PHP 5.2.4 or 5.2.5 on your host?

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!

user7836
Nicolas

PHP on my servers is 5.2.12 and 5.2.13

Isaac

user10589
Dr. Nicolas.

My host promised me he will update to PHP 5.3 in October, but sins ikorpershoek uses PHP 5.2.12 and 5.2.13 i think we have to look somewhere else for this bug.

Why is it that it worked just fine for a few weeks and al of a sudden it brakes-up (skips a big part) of the MySQL database and continues whit processing directories and files. I had this problem ones before but upgrading to Backup Pro v3.1 solved the problem for a while.

I can't imagine PHP 5.2.4 is the problem, although it is buggy as you stated. There must be an other reason, why is it working fine the first few weeks an then suddenly without any reason brakes-up the database and make the backup file exactly as big as the backup from ikorpershoek, namely 36.1 MB

Could you please have a deeper look into the problem?

grtz, Z.

user7836
Zocor

Just to be sure
You run the dutch translation as well.
Could our problem has something todo with that ??

Isaac

user10589
Dr. Isaac.

Yes i do use the Dutch language version.

The Dutch language version has nothing to do whit this problem. You can test it if you like to change the language.
You have to go to Windows Update and in optional updates you can pick any language you want. But i spare you the stubble it has nothing to do whit the Dutch Language version of Windows.

regards, Z. ;)

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Zocor,

First, make sure that you have enough disk space. This could be a potential problem, especially if all backups end up being exactly the same size. I'd also try setting the par size for archive splitting to something less than 36 Mb (e.g. 32Mb) just to be on the safe side.

If nothing else works, send me a PM with Super Admin login credentials to your site so that I can take a closer look.

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!

user7836
Nicolas

I send you the correct admin info yesterday.

Diskspace is no problem at lest 50 GB free
The problem is not bound to just 1 server
The 2nd server I upgraded to 3.1 act the same way.

No backup for several days is getting critical.

Isaac

user10589
@Nicolas.

I have a free disk space left on the server of 3.44 GB so this must be enough. What i see happening during backup is that when it comes to backup the database it starts directly whit the templates (/home/vhosts/zocors-web.nl/httpdocs/blog/templates/ja_purity/images) when normally it starts whit my JoomlaWatch (statistics) entries. I also tried to set the par size for archive splitting to 30MB but no results.

Last good backup is from the 24th which is backed-up and downloaded to my PC but 5 days no backup gets really critical, so please help me out here. I'll send a PM whit your login settings, hope you can figure it out.

Regards, Z.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
@ikorpershoek I still get "De combinatie van gebruikersnaam en wachtwoord is niet correct" when I try to login. Please try that login yourself and check that the info in the PM is correct (including capitalization of the username/password)

@Zocor I can't get the administrator login page, I get redirected to the home page. I think you have enabled Admin Tool's secret work feature. I will need that too in order to login :)

Guys, if you send me the login information by 21:00 GMT I will be able to take a look (and hopefully fix that) today.

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!

user10589
See your PM inbox Nicolas.

grtz, Z. ;)

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
I still don't have your update message, Robert :( Can you please send me an email to nicholas at (this domain) dot com? Thanks!

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!

user10589
I replyed to your PM, i am not at home yet so i use my online gmail emailer to send you the URL.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Yup, I saw that, but still no go. I think that there is some kind of IP filtering involved, either by Admin Tools (the Administrator IP Whitelist) or on your server-side. I've sent you an email with my static IP address so that you can white-list it.

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!

user7836
Nicolas

No ip filtering involved. It's open to all ip's
The info is absolutely correct.

Make sure all caracters in the username and password are lower case.

Isaac

user10589
Hi Nicholas.

I send you an e-mail whit the reason why your login attempts failed, you can login now it was caused by the white-list in Admin Tools as you said. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Z. :rolleyes:

user7836
Nicolas

This is what i did.
I extracted two backups from the same site into two different directories
The large one is from 22 Sept.

Size : 101 MB (106.454.918 bytes)
Size on Disk : 132 MB (138.981.376 bytes)
Contains : 11.073 Files, 2.034 Folders

The small one is from 2 October

Size : 61,2 MB (64.233.558 bytes)
Size on Disk : 92,3 MB (96.821.248 bytes)
Contains : 11.103 Files, 2.042 Folders

The difference in files and folders is because i installed a new component and added some articles.
Look at the difference in size and size on disk
It looks like that some files or maybe all files are not backup-ed completely.

Isaac

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
@Zocor Robert, thank you for the login info. Whitelisting my IP in Admin Tools allowed me to access the site :) I was able to backup the site without any problem and also restore it locally without any problem. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no problem whatsoever with the restored site.

@both of you: The remaining mystery is the size difference, right? Mystery might not be. Some previous versions had a small bug which caused them to backup cache and temporary data from your site due to a typo. This only happened on some hosts. The 3.1 stable addressed this problem and, as you can see in the log file, the contents of the tmp, cache and administrator/cache directories are now excluded.

You don't have to believe me. Download our free Akeeba SiteDiff tool and compare one of the bigger and one of the smaller backup files. See which files are missing from the new, samller archive. You can do that by filtering the list by "Deleted" files. You can also see which files have been modified. If any of the modified files have huge size differences which can't be accounted for, please tell me. Thank you in advance for your feedback!

@ikorpershoek I want you to take a look -with SiteDiff- at which file(s) are "missing". You have a file count difference of 30 files. There is no chance whatsoever that a component contains only 30 files! A typical component contains 200-500 files, unless it's a 1-page component. Given that I already see 8 directories added, I would expect much more than 30 files to have been added. Please do that SiteDiff comparison and we'll know exactly what is going on.

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!

user7836
Nicolas

That is exactly what i was thinking. Maybe the Large file Size was not correct !!!. So i setup a new webserver and did a restore. To my surprise everything was OK this time. I installed the site diff application and did the site difference check.
Although the installation was correct and the program worked correctly the check only ended in some Yellow + signs but no filenames. I saved the results. This only contains the word deleted an many times the word added. No file names. SO this is not very useful I Think

Isaac

user10589
@Nicholas

Same here as Isaac, SiteDiff does not show any file names only X and + icons on the beginning of empty lines. The vertical sidebar for up and down (on the right) does not work when the arrows are clicked. Up and down only works when the little slider in the sidebar is used. When sliding down the lines do not move but when the slider is released then the sliding responds.

So SiteDiff is not of much use. I am going to setup a local server and do some tests myself, not that i don't believe you but as i vaguely remember i had installed Akeeba Backup Pro 3.1 stable about a few days before the file size was suddenly 1/3 of the old backup files.

Z. ;)

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Can you send me a URL to the saved results in a PM? I'd really like to take a look at them.

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!

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Robert, which version of Windows are you using? On Windows 7 the scrollbar works correctly.

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!

user10589
I use Windows 7 ultimate x64, I'll try to uninstall end reinstal sitediff maybe then it works. I had an older version installed first that did not work atall and installed the latest version over it.

I let you know how it went.

user10589
After reinstalling SiteDiff the sidebar works again, but no file list just the icons on the left.



As you can see the status column sizes to the icon size while it should size on the header of the column (Status), but this is not the most important issue.

I compared the two cash files whit araxis merger and see not much differences between the files but i can't see if the MySQL database is fully backed-up in the small file. The last time i tried to restore the smaller file it could not restore the MySQL database leaving me whit a screwed up website. I had to restore a older backup whit the bigger size.

grtz, Z. ;)

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Hm... I'll have to take a look at that SiteDiff bug. It didn't occur during my tests.

Out of curiosity, does the size of installation/sql directory contents between the two versions differ? There should be some fluctuation, but not a terrible one (except if you're using GuardXT; I had to exclude its log table contents in 3.1 as it was causing restoration woes due to the huge amount of data per column).

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!

user10589
The installation/sql/ file sizes are as follows:

The latest backup (large file size) from 24-09-2010 is 3,89 MB (4.083.173 bytes)
The latest backup (small file size) from 03-10-2010 is 4,87 MB (5.111.218 bytes)

Not much of a difference as you can see. I have send you an e-mail explaining what i found in the SiteDiff cash files maybe it's of any use.

I am convinced the backups are just fine now, the problem was in the large backup file.

Regards, Z. ;)

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Yes, I think that the smaller file is the correct one. The bigger file seems to suffer from a bug, causing double backup of certain files.

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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