Backup Wizard Restore of Wordpress Not Working As Expected

[Daniel909]

Hi

I have been using the cPanel Backup Wizard to create partial backups of the Home Directory and the MySQL Database of a Wordpress website.

However, when I have used cPanel Backup Wizard to Restore the website it has not worked as I had expected.

1. Background

The first issue was quite some time ago. Something on the website was not working properly and I thought it would be quicker and easier to Restore to a working version rather than spend time investigating it. Using the Backup Wizard I restored the website (Home Directory and MySQL Database) to an earlier version and the problem was still there, even though I was certain that the website had been working properly when the backup was made. Upon investigation, the problem with the website turned out to be that a plugin had been disabled. What surprised me was that when the website was restored from the Backup, the plugin was not activated. I restored several even older backups and the plugin was not actived on them either.

The second issue was when we needed to upgrade our Wordpress theme (Themify Agency). Immediately before upgrading the theme I created partial backups of the Home Directory and the MySQL Database. Following the upgrade there were a number of issues so I decided to Restore the website using the backup and tackle the upgrade again at another more convenient time. However, after restoring the website (Home Directory and MySQL Database) using the Backup Wizard the theme did not return to its previous working version, it was still the upgraded version. What happened was that there was now a fatal error, the website stopped working completely and I could not login to Wordpress. Eventually I managed to get Wordpress working again and sorted out the upgrade problems.

So in both instances, the restore did not do what I expected, which was to return the website to how it was when then backup was made.


I have extracted the backup files from the .tar.gz backup file on my local computer. The files for the theme are all dated from before the update.

cPanel Version: 102.0 (build 15)
Operating System: Linux


2. Questions

i. What should I restore first, the Home Directory or the MySQL database, or does it not matter?

ii. My assumption was that Restore would replace all of the website files on the server, such that the website would be as it was when the backup was made. Is that not the case?

iii. Should I delete everything in the Home Directory before Restoring?

iv. Is there anything I could be missing when using Backup Wizard Restore?


Thank you for any help you can give me with this.
Daniel

 

[cPRex]

Hey there! I'll just answer those in order to ensure I'm not missing anything:

1 - It doesn't matter at all, as those are separate areas of the system that aren't dependent on each other
2 - That's what I would expect as well....we'll get to this in a bit...
3 - No, that shouldn't be necessary
4 - Hopefully not - it should get everything on the account.

For number 2, you're seeing that a WordPress plugin was *not* enabled after a restore, even though it was enabled when the backup, correct? If that's the case, please confirm I can do some additional testing on my end.

 

[Daniel909]

Thank you for your reply Rex.

That is correct, the Wordpress plugin was *not* enabled after a restore, even though it was enabled when the backup was created. This event occurred a few years ago. The second issue, the restore after the Theme upgrade was six weeks ago. On this occasion, after restoring the upgraded theme was still in place. I was expecting a return to the original version.

You have asked if you could do some additional testing on your end. What would that involve?

 

[cPRex]

Thanks for that confirmation about the issue. I'll do some testing on my end and let you know the results in a bit.

 

[cPRex]

Up to this point I haven't been able to reproduce the issue. Could you submit a ticket to our support team so we could examine a server that is experiencing this issue?