My website has been chewing through disk space recently. I couldn’t work out why and the largest files a few weeks ago were some webstat logs, so I cleared them down. Tonight, as I couldn’t upload anything (or apply any updates) I hunted around and found a couple of error_log files in my webspace. The first related to a PHP file that was reading my Twitter feed using an old API and so was repeatedly failing. I removed the log and the offending PHP but that wasn’t the biggest problem. In my blog’s home folder was a 1.2GB error_log file – loo big to even read properly in Notepad, Word, or anything else I tried.
I managed to download a partial copy of the file (using Filezilla, then cancelling the transfer after a few seconds and saw lots of lines that contained the following error:
WordPress database error Column ‘offset’ cannot be null for query INSERT INTO wp_wpb2d_processed_files (file, uploadid, offset)
That told me it was the (very useful) WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin, by Michael de Wildt. I don’t really want to disable that but luckily I found a fix on WordPress.org, posted by Rich Helms:
The issue is file wordpress-backup-to-dropbox/Classes/Processed/Files.php
Toward the bottom of the program change from
$this->upsert(array(
'file' => $file,
'uploadid' => null,
'offset' => null,
));to
$this->upsert(array(
'file' => $file,
'uploadid' => null,
'offset' => 0,
));so change the offset default from null to 0 and the issue goes away
Sure enough, that change seems to have fixed the problem and whilst the edit to the plugin will be over-written with the next release, hopefully that release will also include a permanent fix!
Just for future reference, if you need to look at a file like that on a Windows machine you can use Notepad++ (free and open source) or drop to a command prompt and type “more filename” which will give you a screenful of text at a time and can handle a file that large because it reads the file without buffering it first. :)
Hey Mark,
A very big thank you. Actually I am using this plugin and I was looking for the solution for this problem. This is working and now I can save some space. So thank you once again for sharing this.
Nice tip – thanks Ian!
No worries Jay – glad it helped. The real thanks are to Rich Helms over on the WordPress forums!