UpdraftPlus
Back up, restore and migrate your WordPress website with UpdraftPlus
Short-cut: If you are developing a new website and see this warning, then simply keep the UpdraftPlus settings page open whilst you back up. You don’t need to read any of the rest!
UpdraftPlus is a WordPress plugin; as such, it relies on WordPress running and handing it the opportunity to do something; in particular, it relies upon WordPress’s scheduled task engine running properly.
Thus if WordPress’s scheduled task engine (“WP Cron”) does not run, then neither can UpdraftPlus. So, if your website has zero visitors between midnight and 5am, and if your backup is scheduled to run just after midnight, then it won’t actually get to run until a visitor turns up at 5 am.
There is usually no danger of this becoming a problem, because even very unpopular websites tend to get visited by several search engines as long as those search engines are aware of them.
However, if enough of the following factors are present, then your backup may not be able to complete:
Another way that this can happen is if your WordPress scheduler has been disabled (you’d usually know if this is so and understand the rest of this paragraph), and you’re instead running the scheduler via an automated task you’ve set up to call wp-cron.php directly. If you only call wp-cron.php once an hour, then this is like just having one visitor per hour as far as WordPress’s scheduler is concerned.
Note: If you were sent to this page by a warning from your copy of UpdraftPlus, then this does not mean for sure that your backups are definitely failing because of this problem – it just means that UpdraftPlus has detected a lack of visitors. It may be that there are still enough. The warning is advisory of a potential problem.
This issue is not a novelty of UpdraftPlus; it is the case for every WordPress backup plugin with scheduled backups.
What are the solutions? Any of these should help:
Note: When using automated visits, certain caching plugins (such as WP Super Cache) can prevent the scheduler from being triggered. If you are having issues, ensure that the automated visit is directed to an uncached page or file.
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