Support

Hello Dan,

Akeeba Solo needs to access the root of the site being backed up directly through the filesystem. Going through FTP is very slow and we've found that in most cases the directory listing is sent by FTP servers in a format that is very hard for PHP to process without timing out and crashing the backup process.

Upon installing Akeeba Solo you need to run the Configuration Wizard. If you canceled the popup asking you to do that just click on Configuration and then look for the blue Configuration Wizard button in the toolbar at the top. The wizard lets you choose the folder of the site to be backed up. Subsequently click on the big, green Auto-detect button to have Solo figure out the db connection details.

All information (path to the site's root and db connection information) is stored in the backup profile. You can create as many profiles as you want from the Profiles manager towards the top of the main page of Akeeba Solo. Just remember to run the Configuration Wizard on every brand new profile. Alternatively, if you want to create different backup jobs of the same site, select a profile and click on Copy. This copies over all configuration settings, including site root path and db connection information.

Please let me know if I can help you any better. If you are still stuck please let me know which steps you've followed upon installing Akeeba Solo Core so I have a better picture of what's going on.

The answer to this depends on your server setup. Can you ask your host if there is a way for just one account –the one hosting Solo– to read files from all other accounts? I suppose that changing the user group under which the files in this one account run and adequate permissions (0755 for directories, 0644 for files) on other accounts would do the trick under most server setups I have in mind. But since it is dependent on the server configuration to which we have no control I kindly ask you to raise this question with your host.

Well, since you're using suPHP (BTW suPHP is not recommended since early 2013 – using PHP FastCGI with sane ownership is the recommended way) each .php script runs under its owner. What you can do is have the server administrator create a common user group, e.g. forbackup, and assign it as the primary user group of all users under your WHM installation. I'm not sure how this can be done as I'm not a host. I know how to do it from the Linux command line on my Ubuntu Server box. That's the part they have to help you with.

From that point onwards it comes does to permissions of all accounts' folders and files. The permissions should be 0755 for folders and 0644 for files. Caveat: every site can see each other site's files. If a site is compromised it can read (not write) data from every other site. This may be a security risk that you want to assess.

Furthermore the open_basedir setup of the account hosting Solo should allow it to access the directories of all other sites. This seems to already be the case based on what you said.

If assigning a common default user group is impossible or undesirable then under your current setup you cannot use Akeeba Solo the way you want to. It's not a software limitation, it's how your operating system is designed to work. You can install Solo on each site's account and have N installations. Alternatively you could run Solo as root but this is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS and not recommended: nothing should EVER –EVER!!!!!– run as root unless it's a daemon startup about to shed its root privileges and fall back to an unprivileged uid/gid. Again, let me stress that this is how the operating system is designed to work, for security reasons.