Support

It looks like you had created recursive symlinks.

The /home/your_user_name/public_html path is a real folder. That's where your site files are a.k.a. your “web root”. There is usually a symlink to it, /home/your_user_name/www, pointing to the real folder /home/your_user_name/public_html.

Somehow you ended up with another two symlinks, /home/your_user_name/public_html/public_html (note the double public_html) and /home/your_user_name/public_html/www (note the public_html before the www). There is no reason to have made these symlinks on purpose; they look like a mistake. They probably used to point back to public_html, creating an infinite symlink recursion.

That is to say, /home/your_user_name/public_html/public_html would also have symlinks to /home/your_user_name/public_html, therefore /home/your_user_name/public_html/public_html/public_html would be a valid path, and so would /home/your_user_name/public_html/public_html/public_html/public_html and so on. You can visualise it as the Portal infinite loop animation:

I am pretty sure this is what caused the high CPU usage on your server, as I am pretty sure that your host's tech saw that, muttered some creative profanities under his breath, and changed the symlink to point to an invalid location to break the infinite loop.

And that's how I assume you ended up with these broken symlinks. You can ask your host to verify — minus the muttered profanities under one's breath, this is a trade secret ;)

This is not a pre-sales request, it's a support request. However, your subscriptions have expired four months ago. Therefore, you are not entitled to support, as per our Terms of Service.

The only reason I replied to this public ticket is because you alleged this is an issue with Akeeba Backup. It's not.

We only read the files while taking a backup. We do not write to symlinks (new or modify) while taking a backup. You have a symlink /home/your_user_name/public_html/public_html which is pointing to a directory or file which does not exist. Since you have told Akeeba Backup to follow symlinks as if they are real files or folders (it's an option in the Configuration page) it detects that it cannot carry out your instruction: you can't possibly list the contents of a folder which does not exist, or read a file which does not exist. As a result, it has to skip over this symlink when taking a backup since it objectively cannot be backed up. This is not even an error, it's a warning. The backup completes normally.

Your problem is that, somehow, symlinks were created or existing symlinks are pointing to something which does not exist anymore. This has nothing to do with our software. Therefore it's outside the scope of our support, and definitely outside the scope of a pre-sales request. Pre-sales requests are limited to answering questions about the capabilities of the software and/or sales-related enquiries (e.g. taxation, payment, delivery, etc).

You really need to talk to your host to understand what is going on. We cannot possibly help you, for the very simple and objective reason that we do not have the kind of access to your server which would allow us to possibly determine what is going on, we have not set up your server (therefore we do not know what kind of automation might be in place to detect and neuter symlink loops), we do not have access to your host's personnel which might have taken an action before you / they rebooted the server. We can't know what we can't possibly know. So there is no point making this ticket private and being dragged into an issue which we are neither paid to handle, nor can we possibly handle as it has nothing to do with our own software.

Please talk to your host.