How to fix UpdraftPlus not creating backups

Introduction

UpdraftPlus is one of the most, if not THE most, popular backup plugins you can use to safely backup your WordPress sites. You—and millions of others—are using it to backup your file and databases and to make sure you can quickly restore your sites to a previous state, should the need arise.

But as with all software, UpdraftPlus is not 100% bug free, and if you’re reading this article, it’s probably because you’ve encountered one such bug. 

The Issue

The issue we’ll look at today is when UpdraftPlus fails to create your scheduled backup. You may have even double-checked to ensure all of your settings are configured correctly but the backups are still not being created.

What exactly does this issue look like?

Well, as you can see in the following screenshots, the scheduled database backup is supposed to be run every 4 hours. But it does not show in the Next Scheduled Backups list.

So what is going on here?

UpdraftPlus is using the WordPress Cron feature to schedule its backups, so let’s first check to see if that’s set up correctly. Do do this, we’re going to install a WordPress plugin that will help us easily see what scheduled processes are being run.

1 – Let’s go into the Plugins menu and click Add New.

2 – In the plugin search field we’re going to type “advanced cron manager”, wait for the results to show up and click Install Now on Advanced Cron Manager – debug & control

3 – After the install is done we have to Activate the plugin.

4 – Now that the plugin is active we can check the plugin settings by clicking Cron Manager.

5 – Here we can search for updraft and see if its scheduled processes are running.

6 – In this screenshot we can see that both the file backup process (updraft_backup) and the database backup process (upraft_backup_database) are showing, which means that Updraft is working correctly.

If one of these 2 process are not showing up in this list that means Updraft will not do the specific scheduled backup.

Regardless of whether you have a files backup or a database backup scheduled, here’s how you fix a missing process.

Fixing a missing process

1 – Go to the UpdraftPlus Settings tab.

2 – Change the specific bugged backup schedule to manual. (In this screenshot I have database but it will work for a files backup too.)

3 – Save your settings

4 – Go back to UpdraftPlus Settings tab and change the backup schedule from manual to the specific schedule you want

5 – Check in Advanced Cron Manager that both the updraft_backup and upraft_backup_database processes are present.

That’s it, UpdraftPlus will now correctly create the scheduled backups! If you have any questions or run into any issues just leave a comment and I’ll come around to help out.

Video tutorial

Here’s the video version of this tutorial: