Earlier this week I wrote a blog post about SQL Server. I scheduled it to go live the following lunchtime (as I often do) and then checked to see why IFTTT hadn’t created a new link in bit.ly for me to tweet (I do this manually since the demise of TwitterFeed).
To my horror, my blog had no posts. Not one. Nothing. Nada. All gone.
Where did all the blog posts go?
As I’m sure you can imagine, the loss of 13 years’ of work invoked mild panic. But never mind, I have regular backups to Dropbox using the WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin. Don’t I? Oh. It seems the last one ran in March.
History: Backup completed on Saturday March 11, 2017 at 02:24:40.
Ah.
Now, having done some research, my backups have probably been failing since my hosting provider updated PHP on the server. My bad for not checking them more carefully. I probably hadn’t noticed because the backup was partially running (so I was seeing the odd file written to Dropbox) and I didn’t realise the job was crashing part way through.
Luckily for me, the story has a happy ending*. My hosting provider (ascomi) kept backups (thank you Simon!). Although they found that a WordPress restore failed (maybe the source of the data loss was a database corruption), they were able to restore from a separate SQL backup. All back in a couple of hours, except for the most recent post, which I can write again one evening.
So, what about fixing those backups, Mark
Tonight, before writing another post, I decided to have a look at the broken backups.
I’m using WordPress to Dropbox v4.7.1 on WordPress 4.8, both of which are the latest versions at the time of writing. The Backup Monitor log for my last (manual) attempt at backing up read:
22:55:57: A fatal error occured: The backup is having trouble uploading files to Dropbox, it has failed 10 times and is aborting the backup.
22:55:57: Error uploading ‘/home/mwilson/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/images/banner/video-seo.png’ to Dropbox: unexpected parameter ‘overwrite’
22:55:56: Error uploading ‘/home/mwilson/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/images/banner/configuration-service.png’ to Dropbox: unexpected parameter ‘overwrite’
22:55:56: Error uploading ‘/home/mwilson/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/images/banner/news-seo.png’ to Dropbox: unexpected parameter ‘overwrite’
22:55:55: Error uploading ‘/home/mwilson/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/images/editicon.png’ to Dropbox: unexpected parameter ‘overwrite’
22:55:54: Processed 736 files. Approximately 14% complete.
22:55:54: Error uploading ‘/home/mwilson/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/images/link-out-icon.svg’ to Dropbox: unexpected parameter ‘overwrite’
22:55:53: Error uploading ‘/home/mwilson/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/images/extensions-local.png’ to Dropbox: unexpected parameter ‘overwrite’
22:55:53: Error uploading ‘/home/mwilson/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/images/question-mark.png’ to Dropbox: unexpected parameter ‘overwrite’
22:55:48: Processed 706 files. Approximately 13% complete.
22:55:42: Processed 654 files. Approximately 12% complete.
22:55:36: Processed 541 files. Approximately 10% complete.
22:55:30: Processed 416 files. Approximately 8% complete.
22:55:24: Processed 302 files. Approximately 6% complete.
22:55:18: Processed 170 files. Approximately 3% complete.
22:55:12: Processed 56 files. Approximately 1% complete.
22:55:10: Error uploading ‘/home/mwilson/public_html/blog/wp-content/languages/plugins/redirection-en_GB.mo’ to Dropbox: unexpected parameter ‘overwrite’
22:55:10: Error uploading ‘/home/mwilson/public_html/blog/wp-content/languages/plugins/widget-logic-en_GB.mo’ to Dropbox: unexpected parameter ‘overwrite’
22:55:09: Error uploading ‘/home/mwilson/public_html/blog/wp-content/languages/plugins/widget-logic-en_GB.po’ to Dropbox: unexpected parameter ‘overwrite’
22:55:09: Error uploading ‘/home/mwilson/public_html/blog/wp-content/languages/plugins/redirection-en_GB.po’ to Dropbox: unexpected parameter ‘overwrite’
22:55:06: SQL backup complete. Starting file backup.
22:55:06: Processed table ‘wp_yoast_seo_meta’.
22:55:06: Processed table ‘wp_yoast_seo_links’.
22:55:06: Processed table ‘wp_wpb2d_processed_files’.
22:55:06: Processed table ‘wp_wpb2d_processed_dbtables’.
22:55:06: Processed table ‘wp_wpb2d_premium_extensions’.
22:55:06: Processed table ‘wp_wpb2d_options’.
22:55:06: Processed table ‘wp_wpb2d_excluded_files’.
22:55:06: Processed table ‘wp_users’.
22:55:06: Processed table ‘wp_usermeta’.
22:55:06: Processed table ‘wp_terms’.
22:55:06: Processed table ‘wp_termmeta’.
22:55:06: Processed table ‘wp_term_taxonomy’.
22:55:06: Processed table ‘wp_term_relationships’.
22:55:05: Processed table ‘wp_redirection_logs’.
22:55:05: Processed table ‘wp_redirection_items’.
22:55:05: Processed table ‘wp_redirection_groups’.
22:55:05: Processed table ‘wp_redirection_404’.
22:55:03: Processed table ‘wp_ratings’.
22:55:03: Processed table ‘wp_posts’.
22:54:54: Processed table ‘wp_postmeta’.
22:54:49: Processed table ‘wp_options’.
22:54:48: Processed table ‘wp_links’.
22:54:48: Processed table ‘wp_feedfooter_rss_map’.
22:54:48: Processed table ‘wp_dynamic_widgets’.
22:54:48: Processed table ‘wp_comments’.
22:54:45: Processed table ‘wp_commentmeta’.
22:54:43: Processed table ‘wp_bad_behavior’.
22:54:43: Processed table ‘wp_auth0_user’.
22:54:43: Processed table ‘wp_auth0_log’.
22:54:43: Processed table ‘wp_auth0_error_logs’.
22:54:43: Starting SQL backup.
22:54:41: Your time limit is 90 seconds and your memory limit is 128M
22:54:41: Backup started on Tuesday July 25, 2017.
Hmm, fatal error caused by overwriting files in Dropbox… I can’t be the only one having this issue, surely?
Indeed not, as a quick Google search led me to a WordPress.org support forum post on how to tweak the WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin for PHP 7. And, after making the following edits, I ran a successful backup:
“All paths are relative to
$YOUR_SITE_DIRECTORY/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-backup-to-dropbox.In file
Dropbox/Dropbox/OAuth/Consumer/Curl.php: comment out the line:
$options[CURLOPT_SAFE_UPLOAD] = false;
(this option is no longer valid in PHP 7)In file
Dropbox/Dropbox/OAuth/Consumer/ConsumerAbstract.php: replace the testif (isset($value[0]) && $value[0] === '@')withif ($value instanceof CURLFile)In file
Dropbox/Dropbox/API.php: replace'file' => '@' . str_replace('\\', '/', $file) . ';filename=' . $filenamewith'file' => new CURLFile(str_replace('\\', '/', $file), "application/octet-stream", $filename)“
(actually, a comment further down the post highlights there’s a missing comma after $filename) on that last edit so it should be 'file' => new CURLFile(str_replace('\\', '/', $file), "application/octet-stream", $filename),)
So, that’s the backups fixed (thank you @smowton on WordPress.org). I just need to improve my monitoring of them to keep my blog online, and my blood pressure at sensible levels…
*I still have some concerns, because the data loss occurred the night after a suspected hacking attempt on my LastPass account; which seems to have been thwarted by second-factor authentication… at least LastPass say it was…