Introduction

If you are having issues with automatic FTP node backup within SolusVM not working it might be worth looking into a possible PID file being stuck from a previous backup run.

This recently happened to one of our customers who use SolusVM, worryingly there were no emails detailing the problem received and the SolusVM admin area was free of any notifications detailing the issue.

Luckily our customer opted for FTP backup monitoring from us, this meant we were able to quickly identify the issue using our monitoring platform and rectify the issue on their hardware.

Cause of FTP Problem

Navigate to the following area within the SolusVM administration interface:

SolusVM Admin > Nodes > List Nodes > Node Name > Auto FTP Backup (Under options)

If you are confident that the FTP server settings are correct, navigate to the "Log" section close to the bottom of the page.

If you have the PID issue you will see something like the following in the logs:

=======================================================================
Backup Log Started : Sep 14 2022 02:00:01
=======================================================================
FTP source directory found
/usr/local/solusvm/tmp/ftpbackup.pid already exists. Is backup already runing?
=======================================================================
Backup Log Finished : Sep 14 2022 02:00:02
=======================================================================

To fix the issue you need to login to the slave node with the problem and run the following:

rm -rf /usr/local/solusvm/tmp/ftpbackup.pid

Re-Trigger FTP Backup

Now you have two options to determine whether backups are going to work. You can either:

1. Wait for the backup schedule to re-run
2. Force a backup

If you wish to force the FTP backup to run then you can run this via CLI on the slave server:

php /usr/local/solusvm/includes/autoftpbackup.php

You should monitor the logs to see if the issue is still present if you force the backup and if you choose to wait look through the logs after backup has run on schedule.

Conclusion

9 / 10 times, this is the reason why you will get problems with FTP backup inside of SolusVM.

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