Support

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Description of my issue:
Backup failed. Then noticed that I needed to upgrade so I thought I would try that before I tried backing up again. Backup failed. This is what the page looked like:
http://screencast.com/t/mE9CCJEaN

Did a search and found this. I replaced the existing download ID with the one in the ticket
https://www.akeebabackup.com/support/akeeba-backup-3x/11414-invalid-package-type-the-update-can-not-proceed.html
but this didn't help so I changed it back to the one that was there.

Seems I've been having a lot of backups fail. See http://screencast.com/t/g0erDaPnOZ8
See log file
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14128936/Akeeba%20Backup%20Debug%20Log-5.txt

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14128936/Akeeba%20Backup%20Debug%20Log-6.txt

Appreciate any help.

Hello Peter,

you have to different issue.
First of all, the download id: please double check your Download ID on Akeeba Backup, change it if it's different from the stored one and then hit "Refresh update information".
The last step is very important, don't skip it.

Regarding your backup, there are several possible reasons:

1. Table with huge data. There are tables with more than 500k rows. Do you really need them? If not, please exclude their content from the backup
2. Directories with a lot of files. Please try to change the scanner engine to Large site scanner

I just saw that the backup took a lot before stopping, something like 40 minutes.
Can you remember if your computer went in "sleep" mode when you were taking the backup?

Hi Davide,
Thanks for responding. Changed the ID and refreshed. Page went blank when I hit the update button. I refreshed the page and it said "bad request". Now there is a notice that says i can't install updates automatically beause I don't have Joomla 2.5.19 but
http://screencast.com/t/gZgqk4XPT
but my system tells me that 2.5.17 is the latest version. See http://screencast.com/t/1FZgJPYE
So what do you recommend?

Regarding my backup:
1) I'm not technical so I don't know what I need or don't need. Why would there be tables with 500k rows if I didn't need them?
2) Changed to "large site scanner" as you suggested, and am trying to backup again. Possible the computer went to sleep but it was already taking a long time before I left it so I don't think that was the problem.

Davide,
the backup completed successfully. Seems the "large site scanner" did the trick.

What do you recommend I do about the automatic update?

Usually those large big tables are storing statistical information (ie visits or something like that).
Most of the time you don't need them when you restore the site.

Receiving a blank page after installing the latest versions of Akeeba Backup, Admin Tools, Akeeba Ticket System, DocImport or Akeeba Release System using Live Update (the update button found inside each component's control panel page) is normal and does not indicate an error.

As described in the change logs of these components, the versions released since March 2014 no longer make use of Akeeba Live Update. Due to popular request all of our software is now making use of Joomla!'s own extensions update feature. In the future you will find the updates to our software in Extensions, Manage Extensions, Update. Joomla! itself will be responsible for discovering, downloading and installing the updates. Our extensions update code (Akeeba Live Update) has been removed from all of our components.

This is the reason you are receiving a blank page. Since you made an update using Live Update, after the update was complete it tried redirecting back to itself. However it was already removed in the updated version, hence the blank page. This is not an error. Your update has been installed just fine. You can verify it by logging back in to your site's administrator page and visiting the component's main page. You will see that our component functions just fine and is, in fact, upgraded to the latest release.

If for any reason the update did network, please consult our documentation which contains detailed instructions for alternative update methods. Cutting a long story short, installing the latest version on top of the old one but without uninstalling the old version will perform an update.

We apologies for the confusion caused by the blank page. Unfortunately it was a bit of a Catch-22 situation for us. If we included Live Update in those releases the same problem would occur in the next version that would not have live update, plus some other interesting update issues (Live Update would report an update available if you used Joomla!'s extensions updater and vice versa). Removing it causes a blank page. Not using Joomla!'s own updater caused distress to many users. Every solution was a bad one. We chose the one that will be the best in the long run.

Whew. Quite a workout to type that. (smile) thanks. And you're right. Akeeba is no longer telling me to upgrade.

Sounds like this will be a non-issue for the next update.

Am doing another backup now as I made some changes to the live site and it's taking very long to complete. How do I exclude those large files that are not necessary for the update?

You can't automatically exclude those files.
You can manually exclude them using the Files and Directories Exclusion