Dangerous, corrupt backups

  • makimat

    (@makimat)


    4 years, 1 month ago

    My client had messed up their site with uncontrolled plugin updates. No worries, I thought, we have UpdraftPlus installed and there are fresh backups available. Well, first UpdraftPlus had troubles restoring the backups and failed when restoring plugins. But when it finally succeeded (i only chose to restore themes, then separately uploads), the site rendered blank. Only wp-admin was still working (lucky me), all the other content was just blank white. Checking from the server side after restore, I noticed the themes and uploads folders under wp-content were empty. When I downloaded the themes and uploads backups to my laptop from UpdraftPlus settings view, the zip files were corrupted and I couldn’t extract them with any zip tools available. Also couldn’t browse them in the Updrafts settings view, it gave an alert about the corrupt zip file.

    So, pretty useless I’d say. A plugin you’d want to trust at the moment of troubles made things even worse. I ended up having empty folders and corrupted zip files, it’s quite hopeless situation and means you have to build a lot of things again from scratch, unless you happen to have other, e.g. manually made backups available too.

    Luckily I had an older replica of the site still luring around on another server, just waiting for being terminated, and I was able to restore themes and most of the uploads from there.

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by makimat.
Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author David Anderson / Team Updraft

    (@davidanderson)

    4 years, 1 month ago

    Hi,

    Sorry to hear that! The actual zip files are created by whatever zip tool is installed on your source server (the PHP zip module, or /usr/bin/zip, usually). On the rare occasions when those tools don’t function correctly, various freeware zip repair tools usually do the job. Please do ask for support in the support forum if you have any problems – there are usually various things that can be done (for example, it may be another component on your WordPress site that interferes in downloading from the WP dashboard, so I’d have recommended downloading via a different mechanism, e.g. your web hosting control panel file manager, or via FTP) to makes sure that a different component isn’t getting involved and introducing corruption).

    On WordPress a completely blank page means a PHP error. The overwhelming cause for that is running on a different PHP version from the source site, which means if some of your plugins or theme have PHP version compatibility requirements, then that’s the issue (and you need to upgrade the plugin/theme, or change PHP versions). The same would happen if you switched your source site to the ‘wrong’ PHP version; that’s not related to a backup/restore process (a backup/restore tool can’t automatically re-write PHP code that’s incompatible with the version you try to run on, for example, if that was the problem). Best to turn on WP_DEBUG to see the actual error message to see if it was that or something else.

    David

    Thread Starter makimat

    (@makimat)

    4 years ago

    Thanks for replying David!

    My biggest concern is that your plugin reports the wrong status to user, giving a false sense of security. It’s a good thing the tool shows a detailed log but if errors happen, e.g the zip file cannot be opened, the tool should clearly report an error in the UI and prevent damage from happening. Without me having to read the full log in order to find out. Now everything seemed fine and UpdraftPlus reported me that the backup has been restored. But I ended up having just emptied directories on the server after restore. That’s unacceptable.

    I cannot possibly know how the plugin internally creates or extracts zip packages and as a plugin user, I shouldn’t be worried about such things, unless it is very explicitly told during installation or configuration that I need to know and check the zip tooling on the server before using the plugin.

    • This reply was modified 4 years ago by makimat.
Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

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