Support

This morning, my Remote Control 4.0.3 prompted me to update to a newer version, namely 4.0.4. I was clicking away doing a bunch of other stuff and missed my window to download.

Is 4.0.4 anywhere on the website to download? If not, how long before I'm prompted again to upgrade? I have closed and re-opened the app a couple times hoping I would get prompted again, but no such luck.

I'd like to see the latest version and test it.

Happy Thursday!
Janis

Good morning, Nicholas!
I'm curious about Remote Control 4.0.4. I configured Remote Control so that my websites get backed up in the wee hours of the morning, but I notice that the application keeps closing. I left it on and open again last night, but when I returned to my desk this morning, Remote Control was closed.

Does your application close after so much inactivity? Something is closing the app and every day when I open it, all the websites begin their backup process, which isn't good to have them backing up all at once. I have them scheduled to run starting at midnight and each new site schedule to begin every half hour.

Is there a way to leave the application open so that the scheduled backups start at their designated time?

Hope you had a great weekend. I look forward to hearing from you about the scheduling aspect of Remote Control.

Thanks a million!
Janis

Well crapola. Had a really long post to submit and lost it because I got timed out.

Basically, one of the sites is closing RC, which in turn won't run scheduled backups until the application is re-opened. I have each website scheduled to send an email when the backuup is complete, so this morning I found the last email and documented the website in case it's the culprit.

Each morning, when I have to re-open RC, all sites backup at one time, which isn't a good thing because nearly all these sites are on shared hosting at GoDaddy.

And I just thought of something after losing my last post. I have a site that has sub-domains configured, all with Joomla installed. I wonder if backing up those sub-domains is duplicating my efforts. Nicholas, is RC smart enough to backup ALL folders, even if they're not a part of the Joomla structure? In other words, will RC backup those sub-domains that are housed in subdirectories of the primary site? Maybe that's my problem.

Each morning, when I re-open RC, at least one of the websites returns this error: Unable to parse JSON string. This morning, it just happened to be on the site with two sub-domains configured.

I have attached the log file of the site returning the JSON error in hopes that I can determine what is going wrong. Let me know about the sub-domains. I think that might be the cause.

Also worth mentioning is that until the "remove backup file from server" option can be resolved, I should probably clean up all websites prior to running the next backup. That might help too, along with clearing the cache.

Thanks for taking a peek at the log file, Nicholas. I sure do appreciate it!

Janis

UPDATE: Got busy doing something else and when I closed my browser window, I noticed RC was closed. Now that I know the offending website, maybe I can determine the root cause for closing RC.

Question: Will I cause problems if I remove old Akeeba Backup files via FileZilla instead of the Joomla back-end interface? I noticed the website that seemed to close RC had a couple J01 files under \administrator\components\com_akeeba\backup.

And the site with the JSON error this morning also has a J01 file in the same location.

I cleaned up these files both via Joomla back-end and FileZilla and am manually running a backup of the same site that apparently closed RC.

Cross fingers, don't hold breath!

The backup in question seems to get "stuck" downloading at 41%. At least it's been there for quite some time now.

Is there a file download limit at all?

Just got an error: Remote API Call Error
HTTP Status: 200 ()
Internal status: timeout
XHR ReadyState: 3
Raw server response:

Attaching log file from this backup. So far RC is still left open.

I'm looking for the same answer. For no reason, ever since the new design change for RC, it just closes itself daily. I notice that there are no controls other then to create backups. How about adding the move to task-bar when minimized? That should keep it open.

Howdy!
Been a while since I posted and just upgraded my Remote Control to 4.0.5 via the automatic update. I still have the issue with RC being closed, but I suspect it's because of the time out issue Nicholas mentioned a few days ago.

While I'm not in a position to switch hosting providers (yet), I am researching different hosting providers in hopes of having better luck with RC, assuming my current provider is part of the reason why the backups fail on occasion.

What I did find, however, was that two domains I support are on the same shared server, so I thought that was causing RC to fail and close the application. But I noticed that their automatic schedule happens to be 3 hours apart. Still, that might be why RC is closing, but will let folks know.

Janis

Good morning, Nicholas!
Funny you should ask about sleep/suspend mode for a PC. I do NOT have my PC configured for sleep mode at all. In fact I set all hardware to NEVER sleep, so that shouldn't be the issue.

Yesterday, I logged into all my websites and cleaned out all .JPA and .JP0 files in the backup folder. Then I upgraded to Akeeba Backup Core 3.2 Alpha and upgraded Remote Control to 4.0.5. I had planned to leave my machine on with RC open and ready to run backups overnight, but there was this big giant storm passing through the US. While that storm only brought rain to us, thank goodness, our little mountain here gets struck by lightning quite frequently, so I shut my PC down to prevent anymore hardware loss.

Tonight will be the true test to see how the latest version of Akeeba Backup and RC work together. I have also compared IP addresses of all websites so that sites that share a hosted server don't try to backup at the same time.

I did notice, however, that a manual backup I took yesterday successfully deleted the JPA file from the server. That's amazing progress and I'm planning to run a few more manual tests to see if the files get removed consistently - even from GoDaddy-hosted servers.

Will post results in case anyone else is interested.

Janis

Ok, first of all, those partial backup files are .J01 files. I assume those are partials. Second, I just now attempted to backup a small website that is a secondary domain. In other words, this particular client has several domains running Joomla in the same hosting environment.

I am attaching the log file saved via Remote Control. This particular website is a sub-domain running Joomla. This site also seems to have numerous Internal Server Error 500, which I have researched with their hosting provider and found that the original CMS used for the site (ModX) is throwing out errors on a regular basis until it reaches the point where the error returns:
mod_rewrite: maximum number of internal redirects reached. Assuming configuration error. Use 'RewriteOptions MaxRedirects' to increase the limit if neccessary.

And, of course, this site closed Remote Control after only 15-20 minutes. SO weird.

The errors will be resolved once I get the entire site converted to Joomla from ModX, but that will take a bit more time to complete.

Here's my question: Is it considered a good practice to use Akeeba Backup & Remote Control on sub-domains? Does this present any kind of issue at all? I would guess no and have been focusing my efforts on getting ModX out of the picture (which is creating all those errors) and get the new site configured on Joomla. BUT, that doesn't take away the two other sub-domains, both installed with Joomla, residing in the same hosting environment.

Is it possible to include those sub-domains (aka sub-directories) somehow in the Akeeba Backup process or am I barking up the wrong tree? Just curious if that makes more sense than trying to run individual backups for each sub-domain.

Thanks Nicholas and I hope the log file is of some help.

Janis

Good info to have regarding backup of multiple domains in one JPA file. Thanks Nicholas! I will continue to back them up separately, but the .htaccess errors will adversely affect all three sub-domain Joomla sites until the issue is resolved.

As for ModX, I have no idea how to fix the error except to get the Joomla site up and running as quickly as possible. The errors are looking for a file/folder structure that simply does not exist. I see what the problem is in the error message, but do not know ModX well enough to resolve the issue.

My best course of action, IMHO, is to get the site converted to Joomla and delete the ModX instance............unless of course there's a ModX expert out there in the wild!

Thanks for the speedy reply!
Janis

Yeah, I'm with you on this one Nicholas. Get J! up and running FAST!! I'll unschedule these backups for now and leave all others to see if I get backups on all of them AND RC remains open and is still open tomorrow morning.

Cross fingers, don't hold breath.