Troubleshooting: BackWPup Next Cron Job at Dec 31, 1969

As usual, on the new website, I created few backup jobs in BackWPup (Free) – my favorite WordPress backup plugin, setup the scheduled start time with WordPress cron. Because I setup one daily backup also send a copy to Box.Com via email, which will trigger an automatic notification email from Box.Com, I get to know if the scheduled backup is executed on time. But something strange happened after the following two days. The scheduled backup didn’t start as expected.

After login to check backup jobs, I found the scheduled time was set to “December 31, 1969 5:00pm”. This, of course, is not correct. So I did a manual backup (again) by clicking on “Run Now”, to make sure the backup itself works fine. Then reset the time back to what I wanted, every day in the early morning.

backwpup-next-cron-job-1960-december

The next day, nothing happened. And this time, another scheduled backup job was set to “December 31, 1969” as well.

There are other website of mine running BackWPup on the same web server without such problem. So I did some comparison, and realized one difference, “ALTERNATE_WP_CRON”.

When I created the first backup job on this website, the backup job didn’t even start. I had to resolve the problem by following another solution (Please refer to my post: BackWPup: A backup job has started, but nothing happens), add “define(‘ALTERNATE_WP_CRON’, true), to WP-CONFIG.PHP. But can’t remember for what reason, this line doesn’t exist on the comparison site.

After removing this line –Ā  “define(‘ALTERNATE_WP_CRON’, true)” from WP-CONFIG.PHP, the scheduled job started work again.

So, the complete solution for my previous problem, BackWPup: A backup job has started, but nothing happens, should be changed to:

1. Add ALTERNATE_WP_CRON to start the backup work for the very first time.

2. Remove this code from WP-CONFIG.PHP to make sure it won’t interfere with scheduled wp-cron job.