I would like a monitor or test that tells me if the retention is working and not simply what date the last successful backup was.
Before I do any bulk updates I want to make sure backups are happening. The only thing I have on the main sites list is the date of the last backup. This is nice but doesn’t tell me if my retention settings are working.
For example, if I have retention such as saving 2 weeks of daily backups, I want to know if there are 14 daily backups successful or not. If there was one backup yesterday but then a gap of 8 missing backups, I want to know this is happening.
I want to see at least 3 or more successful daily backups before I bulk update, not just that there is one single latest one.
The only way I see to help with this is if the Updraft plugin verifies retention settings against all the saved backups logged. This way I can get at least a warning that the backup doesn’t appear complete.
Even a small marker or counter showing how many daily backups are seen, for example “Latest Backup m/d/y [5]” where the 5 is just a count of consecutive days based on retention. If I had incremental backups every 4 hours, then it would be consecutive 4 hours backups.
All I want to know is if “create backup every XX time” is working by counting or checking if that is happening and if there are breaks or missing recent backups.
Ultimately I will not bulk update websites unless I know backup retention is happening more than just seeing there is one recent backup on the sites table listing. I am checking every site one by one to at least make sure I have many days of successful backups first and that my retention appears to be happening properly. This is a long process that gets old but it’s important to stay safe.
It is not uncommon to have at least one website with a odd backup issue almost every time I go to bulk update. Or I find gaps in the expected retention.
Another bug I’ll find is when backup zips get stuck and the backup size becomes large, many gigs or 10s of gigs I’ve seen. I can only verify this by opening the sites one by one and looking at the backup settings to see the total size. For me, I send all backups to S3 and don’t save them locally so my total backup size is typically less than 10MB which is just the size of log files really.
Just today I went to bulk update and found one site with over 1.1GB and another over 6GB of stuck or corrupt or files that didn’t finish processing to S3. I need to know about these before I do bulk updates.
Hopefully the Updraft plugin could be improved to give me more warnings if things don’t look right. Which I’m thinking is just a matter of the plugin checking the recorded backups against retention settings. And giving me total backup size for the heck of it.
