It’s still dead, Jim.
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Exports are still a dead parrot. Would some kind soul grant me another monthly attempt to keep my posted data current, please?
WP.com: Yes
Correct account: YesThe blog I need help with is: (visible only to moderators and staff)
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Hi there,
Can you please let me know if you’re trying to export all your content or only the previous month?
Also, are you still using the desktop app or the web interface?
And one last thing. You were able to export your content until recently (a few months back), right?
I’m asking all those questions to better help our team troubleshoot your issue.
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Hi @fstat. I’d like the whole enchilada, please – not an incremental.
I’m still using both the [legacy] desktop app and and the web UI – and neither exports as yet. (I tried multiple browsers prior to no avail; it doesn’t appear to be a browser issue.)
Yes – if memory serves, export’s worked flawlessly for me for a dozen-plus years.
This is my third ‘in-house’ export, so export’s been dysfunctional (and verified as such) for somewhere between two and three months now.
I’m still seeing “There was a problem preparing your export file. Please check your connection and try again, or contact support.” on every export attempt. (Trying again gets the same response.)
The only difference on my end is that I used to ‘backup’ after each set of postings, but I’m doing it monthly now to reduce busy-work on both sides of WP’s servers.
TIA for your efforts on my behalf.
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Are you able to export just the month or two since your last full export?
That will most likely work, and they if you ever need to import, they won’t create any duplicates during import.
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Hi again staff-blorbo. No, I’ve not attempted an incremental export – nor do I wish to go the piecemeal route.
While I wasn’t traumatized at an early age by a certain unnamed OS’s ‘apply all 4096 patches in the correct sequence and you win!’ approach, I’d rather forgo the additional complexity. “Simple is beautiful.” :)
TIA for any help you can provide in that regard.
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Please test for us whether or not an incremental export works. We’re trying to gather information to help us determine what’s causing this.
Can you check if the export works if you do it from https://0ddn1x.wordpress.com/wp-admin/export.php instead?
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Hi @kokkieh. I have been trying both the WP app and the web UI so far; this check will use only the URL you provided.
From the URL you specified, I can see a range of export choices other than just the complete export. (It’s the page I used to see when exports were working.)
Using it, full exports fail, pages-only-subset exports fail, and time-based subset export (all posts from October 2021..November 2021 inclusive – I assume both months should be included in it) also fails.
Each attempt brings me back to the same menu / page without any notification of the export succeeding, (which is inconsistent with the way WP used to act – it used to notify me that an export had taken place).
Also, within a few minutes of an attempt, the system used to have an export file waiting for me (with a URL and a message suggesting it’d remain online for a week) in email. I’ve waited fifteen minutes and nada.
Sorry, no joy so far.
If there is something else you’d like to check (again, as necessary, or in a different way) please let me know.
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Hi there,
I’ve tried on our end and we don’t seem to have the same issue that you are having. As well several members of staff have been able to download backups without issue, so we’re at the point where we’ve run out of things we can try here unfortunately.
On this end we have used our option to “log you out” of your account, in the hopes this will help reset things. It’s literally the last thing we can think to do here. Have you also cleared your browser cache and cookies to eliminate that as a variable? If not please do.
Our export system is intended for occasional use for migrating your site to another WordPress instance, and is not intended to function as a backup (we maintain fully redundant server level backups for this purpose) so it would be best if you trusted our backup schema to do it’s job, and not worry so much about making these monthly “backups.”
We’re happy to provide a full site backup if you intend to migrate to another WordPress site, but staff cannot assist you in making monthly “backups” as they are not strictly speaking necessary.
Now that you are required to log in to your account again, are you able to proceed with an incremental backup of Oct-Nov 2021? Thanks for the additional info!
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It’s poor hygiene to permit cookies to survive a browser shutdown and no browser I use will permit (even intentional quasi-permanent) cookies to exceed a session. (They’re auto-converted to session cookies on receipt and everything’s blitzed on shutdown.)
Once the browser is closed, there are no surviving cookies unless I go out of my way to deliberately override that default configuration on a case-by-case basis.
– To triple-verify the session would be pristine, I even bleached the drive and zeroed all slackspace on it.
– I then created a virtual machine, put a more recent Firefox on it than existed on my other distro (to rule out the age of the browser and make certain the distro itself wasn’t at fault).
I’m in the VM now – fully isolated from the host machine – and have attempted both saves exactly as before: full archive and incremental, using the URL you specified.
Different distros, multiple different browsers, different hardware, web UI rather than the WP electron app… and still nothing works (including your ‘log me off’ voodoo). I’m at as much of a loss as to what’s causing this as you are.
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And yes, @fstat – I was able to export my content until recently (a few months back)… and @kokkieh, I was using the web page you specified. I appreciate your thoroughness, guys.
If you’ve any other ideas that would be useful for test cases, I’ll be happy to try them out too.
If I may ask, what machines and OSs were capable of making full and/or partial archival exports? Did they use Chrome or Safari browsers to do so?
Is there anything in WP’s new export routines that’re OS-specific or that rely on external services where WP didn’t before?
As best as I can tell, every other variable has already been accounted for.
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At this point sadly there is nothing else we can think to try. You could however consider creating a second admin account on 0ddn1x.wordpress.com and then logging into that account for the purposes of creating an export file.
In my tests that worked just fine, so it seems the issue is limited to your current account only. You can create a second account by:
- First logging out of your @0ddn1x account
- Then go here and follow the steps to create a new account: https://wordpress.com/start/account/user/
You can then log back in as @0ddn1x and follow the steps here to invite the newly created account as an admin. https://wordpress.com/support/user-roles/
You should be able to then log into the second account and create an export under that login.
Again I want to clarify, if you need an export file for the purposes of moving off our service, we’re happy to help with that. But as we’ve stated the export process is not intended to be used for regular backups, and we cannot help you with creating exports for that purpose.
If you would like to have regular backups on your site that are accessible to you to download and/or restore from, you may wish to consider our WordPress.com Business Plan which does include this enhanced backup feature.
Learn more about our WordPress.com Business Plan here: https://wordpress.com/pricing/
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Thanks, staff-totoro – crystal on all points. You think like an admin – ‘if a system won’t co-operate, configure around it’. :)
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that an account this age is a little quirky; it’ll be 16 next year. As per one of the more recent Terminator movies, it’s “old but not obsolete”.
I’ll give your workaround a try on the weekend and hope all’s well thereafter. Thanks to you and everyone involved for the efforts expended on my behalf.
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