Scheduled backup does not start

The schedule in the Backup plugin depends on WP-Cron. WP-Cron is not a real system service; it is triggered by page views — on a quiet website a scheduled backup therefore misses its time window. The plugin shows the actual state in one place instead of leaving you to guess it.

What drives the run

A backup run consists of several short passes. They are driven in two ways: via the cron event and via the admin pulse. The admin pulse carries the work a little further on every wp-admin page that someone with administrator rights opens, and only after the page has been delivered. It does not start a new run, though; it only pushes an already started one further along — for a run that never begins it does not help.

Reading the state

1. Open the “Kakapo Backup” entry in the WordPress menu.
2. Switch to “Status” on the left in the “Status” group.
3. Read the status rows in the “WP-Cron helper” card.
4. In the “Configuration” group, check under “Schedule” (in German: „Zeitplan“) whether “Scheduled backup” is switched on and which “Time” is entered.
5. Back in the “Status” area, click “Check again” in the “Diagnostics” card.

• “Schedule enabled” — if it says “no” here, the switch in the “Schedule” (in German: „Zeitplan“) panel is off and no run is scheduled at all
• “DISABLE_WP_CRON constant” — if it says “set”, WordPress does not start the cron itself, and a system cron then becomes mandatory
• “Next scheduled run” — names the date and the remaining time or reports “no event registered”
• “Last actual run” — comes from a counter of its own that is set when the backup cron event fires; if it is empty, the most recent scheduled success from the log is shown instead, and only if that is missing too does it say “never observed yet”

System cron instead of page views

The same card contains two ready-made lines for a real system cron, each on a 15-minute cycle: variant A calls wp-cron.php via curl, variant B uses WP-CLI. Both blocks are already filled in with the real address and the real path of this installation respectively and can be copied straight away. As long as DISABLE_WP_CRON is not set, the card additionally shows the matching line for the wp-config.php.

define( 'DISABLE_WP_CRON', true );

A run that has started stalls

The “Diagnostics” card contains the line “Job lock file can be created”. If the lock file cannot be created, no run can be carried out; the line explicitly names write permissions and open_basedir as the causes. Below that, the “Auto Recovery” card uses “Clean up now” to clear away a stuck run indicator as well as orphaned temp files and partial archives. A run that has given no sign of life for more than ten minutes counts as orphaned — it is not thrown away, but picked up again with the same scope on the next start.