Online Backup

Can you upgrade to 3.0.3 and see if it works better?

If you go to activity log you can see the failed scheduled activity. If you click View Events it will give you the error if it had an error. If you provide us with this error we can help better. Also please provide information from Help & Support tab as that helps too.

Thanks.

Jason

Hi,

The backup filename should be fine, we do encode them in UTF-8. Make sure you are using the latest version.

If your file has a character that is NOT UTF-8, then the plugin will replace it with a question mark. If you are seeing strange characters and not question marks, it’s probably a problem with your ZIP client not understanding UTF-8. If you let us know what client it is we can have a look if we find time.

If you are seeing question marks though… then it won’t be UTF-8 and it may be your file is using some other character set. When we read files from filesystem we only support ASCII and UTF-8. To support all the character sets, and to have to try and detect them, would be a very difficult thing to do, so we just assume UTF-8. Maybe if you know your filesystem character set we can make an option where you can tell the plugin what it is and it will try to convert the filename from that character set to UTF-8 so you don’t lose these characters – it’s just without knowing or trying to detect the original character set, which is difficult, we won’t be able to maintain them.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Jason

Does the error happen every time you run?

Looks like a problem with some error reporting since it should give a bit more detail I think. It seems like it’s detected a failure but it wasn’t logged. That error is normal as the WPDB wrapper triggers it but it can be ignored, just warning.

Can you try 3.0.3?

Hi FastTS,

I’ve been on personal leave, sorry. Can you try 3.0.3. Just pushed that out now. It has some adjustments that may help.

I’m going to get trace version ready to try in case 3.0.3 doesn’t work still. The trace will generate a log file on your server we can use to see what it was doing, where it got up to, and what it tried to do. So should give us a good idea of what’s happening (or make it even more strange! ^^)

Jason

Can you try using a different internet browser to download the file? Or try downloading on a different computer on a different internet connection?

It is very odd it is not letting you download the whole thing. It does seem something unrelated to the plugin since the download is done by your host – we just make the file and make it downloadable.

If you are willing to give us the file you can email support “at backup-technology.co.uk and reference this topic, we can provide FTP details and check the file over. We can then tell if it been corrupted or if it just not downloading properly.

Jason

Hi Karen,

It looks to be back online. Do you know what the problem was?

I believe last time we have seen this the web site didn’t have enough space to create a backup, and during making backup it filled the space up, and for some reason this meant the host takes the site offline. It’s impossibly for us to detect what space is available like this – but the plugin needs to be able to copy everything into a backup file (using similar space to WordPress, but less because compressed).

Jason

Hi Tony,

PHP is not an executable format and just a script, and the file is a valid script that if accessed just exits – the backup data is kept inside that script. This protects from download where if it was ZIP and someone accessed it would download.

This is how it always was in order to keep the backup secure – however, local backups is somewhat different than it used to be and the filename is now randomly generated so maybe this is not as necessary anymore, but it is a sensitive area.

If we can find out the specific pattern the anti-virus is picking up it may be better as we could keep the status-quo and just make things not match the pattern.

Preventing a script from creating PHP files would seem a bit OTT as lots of cache plugins do almost the same in order to speed up page view while still keeping some elements dynamic.

Jason

Hi Bob,

This is in the works at the moment, we do understand the need for this.

Jason.