Backup of temporary site states

[dave-ha]

One of my customers had some troubles with WPB 10.4.4:

She was not able to save any snapshots for days and got the error "Unexpected Server Behaviour". However, she could edit the content in the editor, so she continued to work on her site for a couple of days hoping that snapshots could be saved again soon. She did not publish the site during that time.

Then, she reloaded the latest snapshot by mistake. Having done that, saving snapshots worked again - but all changes she made in the editor during days were lost. I contacted her VPS hoster who had bad news: They were not able to reload an old temporary WPB state from a backup as "that data could not be reloaded per site from the shared database".

If this is in fact the current setup I propose an enhancement: It should be possible to reestablish WPB site states. What is your opinion?

Can you help me with the following questions: Where are such errors logged? Who can check these logs on a VPS? How long can such logged errors be checked? Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[custer]

Hi Dave,

WPB Stand-alone logs location:
[root@ppse ~]# cat /usr/local/sb/config | grep "log ="
log = tmp/sitebuilder.log

WPB with Plesk logs location:
[root@sb5 ~]# cat /usr/local/sb/config | grep "log ="
log = /usr/local/psa/admin/logs/sitebuilder.log

Web server logs:
Stand-alone: /var/log/httpd/sitebuilder_error.log
Plesk: /var/log/sw-cp-server/error_log

She was not able to save any snapshots for days and got the error "Unexpected Server Behaviour"

Your customer should've contacted you immediately so you could escalate this issue to our support team. I think the root cause of the problem still persists, so similar (or worse) errors might happen in the future.

That said, we plan to improve our backup functionality and also introduce a proper per-site backup that site owners can use. There's no specific info yet on when and what exactly will be done, though.

 

[dave-ha]

Yeah, she waited for a long time and contacted me only after all was gone.

I guess one would need root access to check the WPB log file? I got the impression from her hoster that it was too late to track things down and find the cause of the issue - but looks can be deceiving. When are WPB logs purged from the system? Would those logs still help you in the case of my client?

PS: I like the idea of a proper per-site backup and keep my fingers crossed for your plans. Thank you!

 

[dave-ha]

Hi Custer,
I wonder if the plans for this became more specific. Could you possibly share an update with me on this? Thanks!

 

[custer]

Hi Dave,


I can tell you that this is not going to happen in 11.5, but might happen in later releases. That's the only specific information I have at the moment.

 

[dave-ha]

Thanks, Custer. So far I had no further complaints from clients which might be because they are aware of it and are saving snapshots more often.