BackWPup - WordPress Backup Plugin

Restoring backups made with BackWPup can be done multiple ways. Please take a look at our documentation here to learn more. BackWPup Pro includes a convenient restore feature to restore your backups directly from your WordPress admin. BackWPup Pro also offers many additional features including more settings, destinations, a Standalone Restore App and of course access to our premium support. To learn more about the differences between BackWPup Free and Pro, have a look at this chart.

BackWPup uses WordPress’ own cron job system (WP Cron) to execute scheduled backup jobs. In order for WordPress to “know” when to execute a job, its “inner clock” needs to be set regularly. That happens whenever someone (including yourself) visits your site. If your site happens to not being visited for a period of time, WordPress’ inner clock gets sort of slow. In that case it takes an extra server-side cron job to regularly call http://your-site.tld/wp-cron.php and tell WordPress what time it is. A simple way to find out whether WP Cron works as it should on your site is to create a new post and set its publishing date to some point in the future, i.e. 10 minutes from now. Then leave your site (that’s important), come back after 11 minutes and check whether your scheduled post has been published. If not, you’re very likely to have an issue with WP Cron.

That means a backup job has started, but BackWPup doens’t know where to store the backup files. Please cancel the running job and re-edit its configuration. There should be a Tab “To: …” in your backup job’s configuration. Have you set a backup target correctly?

Solution #1

• Open BackWPup->Settings
• Go to the Informations tab.
• Find Server self connect: in the left column.
• If it says something like (401) Authorisation required in the right column, go to the Network tab and set the username and password for server-side authentication.
• Try again starting the backup job.

• Open wp-config.php and find the line where it says if ( !defined('ABSPATH') ).
• Somewhere before that line add this: define( 'ALTERNATE_WP_CRON', true );

BackWPup performs a simple HTTP request to the server itself every time you click run now or whenever a backup job starts automatically. The HTTP response test message could mean:

• Your host does not allow loop back connections. (If you know what WP_ALTERNATE_CRON is, try it.)
• Your WordPress root directory or backup directory requires authentication. Set username and password in Settings->Network.
• The Server can’t resolve its own hostname.
• A plugin or theme is blocking the request.
• Other issues related to your individual server and/or WordPress configuration.

Please set CHMOD 775 on the /wp-content/ directory and refresh the BackWPup dashboard. If that doesn’t help, try CHMOD 777. You can revert it to 755 once BackWPup has created its folder.

Go to Settings->General and disable “Display folder sizes on files tab if job edited”. Calculating folder sizes can take a while on sites with many folders.

Try opening the text file in an editor software like Notepad++ (Windows) or TextMate (Mac) to preserve line-breaks.

Go to Settings->Jobs and try a different option for “Reduce server load”.

Yes. Go to your BackWPup temp directory and find a file named backwpup-xyz-working.json where “xyz” is a random string of numbers and characters. Delete that file to cancel the currently running backup job.

Yes. You need to have writing access to the wp-config.php file (usually residing in the root directory of your WordPress installation).

• Open wp-config.php and find the line where it says if ( !defined('ABSPATH') ).
• Somewhere before that line add this: define( 'WP_TEMP_DIR', '/absolute/path/to/wp/your/temp-dir' );
• Replace /absolute/path/to/wp/ with the absolute path of your WordPress installation and your/temp-dir with the path to your new temp directory.
• Save the file.

• %d = Two digit day of the month, with leading zeros
• %j = Day of the month, without leading zeros
• %m = Day of the month, with leading zeros
• %n = Representation of the month (without leading zeros)
• %Y = Four digit representation for the year
• %y = Two digit representation of the year
• %a = Lowercase ante meridiem (am) and post meridiem (pm)
• %A = Uppercase ante meridiem (AM) and post meridiem (PM)
• %B = Swatch Internet Time
• %g = Hour in 12-hour format, without leading zeros
• %G = Hour in 24-hour format, without leading zeros
• %h = Hour in 12-hour format, with leading zeros
• %H = Hour in 24-hour format, with leading zeros
• %i = Two digit representation of the minute
• %s = Two digit representation of the second