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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#9090 Couldnt write to the archive file

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 Monday, 03 October 2011 05:55 CDT

user43402
Mandatory information about my setup:

Have I read the related troubleshooter articles above before posting (which pages?)? No
Have I searched the forum before posting? No
Have I read the documentation before posting (which pages?)? No
Joomla! version: 1.5x
PHP version: Various
MySQL version: various
Host: (optional, but it helps us help you)
Akeeba Backup version: Akeeba Backup Professional 3.3.4 (2011-09-12)

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: Please attach your Akeeba Backup log file in order for us to help you with any backup or restoration issue.

Description of my issue:
I am getting this error message on a number of sites I have installed backup on:

[111003 10:10:37] Couldn't write to the archive file; check the output directory permissions and make sure you have enough disk space available.[len=0 / 3]

Probably 60% of the sites all on the same server give this error. Can you assist?

Many thanks

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Please check inside your output directory (by default administrator/components/com_akeeba/backup). There should be one or more .j01 files in there. What are their 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!

user43402
Hi,

On this particular site they are 755.

Thanks

user43402
Interestingly I have just checked a site that the backup ran correctly on and there are no .j01 files in the dir.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
When a new backup is started, a .j01 file is created with 0755 permissions, written to and later renamed to .jpa. The thing is that the 0755 permissions give full read/write access to the file's owner which is supposed to be the user under which PHP runs under. It looks like in your server this is not the case, which is really baffling. Let's try something different. Give the administrator/components/com_akeeba/backup directory 0777 permissions and retry backup. Does that work?

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!

user43402
Hi,

Just checked the dir permissions and they are already set to 777 !

user43402
I Have just checked one of the other failing sites, the dir permissions were 755, odd that its different. I changed to 777 and tried again but it failed.

I went into the 2 sites and deleted all the .j01 files and tried it again. It worked.

I am also using Remote Control 4.0.8 but when using it I get some errors such as:

Backup failed (hard error): A backup error had occurred: Couldn't write to the archive file; check the output directory permissions and make sure you have enough disk space available.[len=4811 / 11715]

But When I check the actual remote site the backup file is indeed created (I selected delete and download the copy to the pc where RC is installed, but it didnt do this).

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
OK, I see what's going on now. You are simply running out of free disk space. We suggest that you have at least 40-50% of your disk quota free before taking your first backup - usually this is more than plenty of space. If you have older backup archives, you might want to remove them. The thing is, if your hosting account runs out of free disk space, you will get this kind of errors. Especially in the latter case where only 4 out of 10.5 Kb (4811 / 11715) were written to disk, there is no other explanation than running out of disk space.

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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