Question Can't take backup of site

[carlsson]

Server operating system version

Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS

Plesk version and microupdate number

Version 18.0.59 Update #2

When I try to create a backup of a site with WP Toolkit, it takes a couple of minutes were nothing happens, and then Plesk gives an error. No backup is created. The site itself is quite large.

Looking at memory usage during this time gives as per the attachment. I also got a Swap critical error one of the times i tried.

Should I increase the swap size? How's the best way to do this?

 

[Kaspar]

When I try to create a backup of a site with WP Toolkit, it takes a couple of minutes were nothing happens, and then Plesk gives an error. No backup is created. The site itself is quite large.

Is "No backup is created" to only thing shown in the error message? Also how large is the site?

Are there any relevant log entries in Tools & Settings > Log Browser > Plesk?

Looking at memory usage during this time gives as per the attachment. I also got a Swap critical error one of the times i tried.

Should I increase the swap size? How's the best way to do this?

Plesk recommendeds to have 1,5x of the servers memory as swap space. You have 8 GB of memory, so your recommended swap space would be 4 GB.

I'd suggest asking your server provider help on this. They might be able to this for you or maybe have an detailed article/tutorial available. If not search for any other tutorial to increase your swap for your specific OS (Ubuntu 20.04).

 

[carlsson]

Thanks for the input Kaspar!
The site in total is 19GB… Even if that's much you should be able to take a backup, right?
It's a multisite, and I'm not the one that built it, I'm just hosting it. (I could probably remove 18 of those GB but at the moment I just want to have a working copy.)

I changed the Swap size to 4 GB, but that didn't help.
The progress never leaves 0%, being this 5 to 10 minutes:


Errors look as follows:




I*might* have an idea about this; Except the brutal size of this thing, in the wp-config.php file there's a line "DON'T ALLOW EDIT ("TRUE")" which locks the file from any kind of tampering. I still think I should be able to copy it though, but that may have something to do with it?

 

[Kaspar]

Right, 19 GB is actually quite large. I am not surprised the backup fails. What I suspect is happing is that the backup process times out because it takes a lot of time to compress 19GB of data. The WP backup feature uses (at least from my understanding) just a ZIP archive to compress all files and the database. To be sure if the backup actually failed have a look in the wordpress-backups directory of the home directory of the domain.

What you could do is to try to create a database dump and archive (ZIP) the website files manually. Not as elegant, but better then noting I suppose?

You can use these command to create ZIP archive manually of the httpdocs directory. A database dump can be made with from the database option of the domain in Plesk.

cd /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/
sudo -u <system_user_of_subscription> zip -r /var/www/vhosts/example.com/backup.zip .

Use plesk bin subscription -i example.com | grep "FTP Login" to get the the system user of the subscription, and replace <system_user_of_subscription> in the command example above.

Swap is unrelated btw. But it's always good to have plenty of Swap space

 

[carlsson]

Followup;
Reducing the content of the site folder (eg logs, four year old backups etc etc) made the backup work.

Thanks for the input!