Scheduled Backup is not performed

[ChristosS]

The scheduled backup process does not trigger or it fails with no report whatsoever.

I've found this report in migration.result on a day that plesk was supposed to backup a domain.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<execution-result status="error" log-location="/usr/local/psa/PMM/sessions/2011-12-11-041406.504/migration.result">
<object name="***.net" type="domain">
<object name="***.net" type="hosting">
<message id="aa02671e-7bb9-4e82-8dcf-b721fc26cbe6" severity="error" code="UtilityError">
<description>Unable to backup Site Builder publishing status on site ***.net (ErrorCode: 1, STDOUT.</description>
</message>
</object>
</object>
</execution-result>

As a result I can't schedule my domains to backup automatically. It is plesk 10.4.4 centos. Also the option in the backup scheduler to send email with the error report, if a backup process fails, never worked.
Is there anything that can be done to resolve this issue caused by your inconsiderate updates? Backup scheduling worked fine a few versions back (3-4 months ago).

 

[ChristosS]

After 5 months I finally traced the problem on plesk backup scheduler. To be honest I was determined not to report this bug because plesk support simply does not deserve such feedback. But for the sake of any1 that might come across this bug I’ll post it anyway.

Back in August the server I lease had an issue with the ILO interface and we had to have it cold rebooted in order to fix the problem. After the reboot the system clock was erroneously set by itself to year 2020. I found out about that a day later and fixed the system clock. As it turned out that day was a scheduled day for backups for 8 domains on plesk. Those domains never triggered the auto update since that day.

I asked, and emailed, and crawled these forums for troubleshooting and the only hint I got back was that I had to purchase a 75$ support ticket to have my server checked out. Until yesterday I found this http://kb.parallels.com/6194 which explained how the backup scheduled works. After clearing out the year 2020 from this table the backup schedule works correctly.

This is obviously a bug. When the scheduled backup is unchecked from the panel it should clear out the corresponding entry in the database. The user should be able to return to zero configuration somehow.

By the way, I also found that some files created in PMM/tasks (when a backup process is selected by the panel) has the user name and password stored of the ftp server. The main reason of using ftp is to have safe backups in the case of security breach. Therfore ftp passwords must always be encrypted!

One more thing, in order to setup backups for my clients in my remote ftp server I am obliged to hide the backup manager from their accounts because they will then have access to all of the ftp backups of other clients. I know that this is solved by having multiple ftp users in the remote server but that does not necessarily come with the lease contract. ( I personally have one ftp account for such use by my supplier) Also even if I had that, I would again need to have separate backups from the ones that the user sets up by himself because lets face it, it is possible for him to screw up and ask backups from me. So it would be handy to have the ability to backup separate domains from the admin panel. The full backup does not work for me as there are some clients with domains that have many gigabytes and I can’t exclude domains from the admin panel.