cPanel Backups seem to have stopped working

[tribey2]

Hello,

Hoping someone may be able to help here! I run a server with WHM/CPanel that has around 10 accounts/sites on it.

Each night I backup all accounts to my home NAS drive over SFTP and have been without a hitch for around 10 months.

For some reason my server hasn't backed up since 18th May and I can't work out why. Nothing has changed as far as my home router/NAS is concerned, and if I go into the Backup settings in WHM I can validate the SFTP successfully (if I change the backup folder name and validate, I can see a new folder created on my NAS - so the server is definitely still able to connect).

On the basis it validates correctly, I'm at a bit of a loss as to why this might be happening - is there anything I can do to see why it might be failing in terms of logs etc? I've located the backup logs at /usr/local/cpanel/logs/cpbackup/, but the last log here is from 18th May (which isn't much help).

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance.

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello,

You can force a backup generation with a command such as:

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/backup --force

Does the backup work as intended when you run it manually? If so, verify the "crond" service is running:

service crond restart

Thank you.

 

[tribey2]

Hi Michael,

Thanks a lot for getting back to me!

I logged into my VPS and ran the top command and was told that 'A backup process is already running'. So I followed the options to 'watch the backup' and it says:

'System load is currently 5.18; waiting for it to go down to 0.88 to continue'.

So I think we've found the problem! I logged into my digital ocean account to have a look at CPU usage over the past 30 days. Prior to 19 May the CPU usage averaged at about 5% - but since 19 May it has jumped right up to a solid 99.9% and stayed there!!!

So my next question is, is there any way to see what process is causing this?!

Thanks again for your help.

Rob

 

[tribey2]

Hello again...

Found it! It was a rouge Wordpress gallery plugin on one of the sites (that wasn't even activated) that appeared to be in an endless loop. I've killed the process in WHM, so hopefully this will now be resolved.

Thanks for help with this!

Rob

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello,

I'm happy to see you were able to identify the source of the CPU usage. Thank you for updating us with the outcome.