Problem performing Database Backup

[stoo23]

Hi all, New member here and New to SMF.

Due to the 'passing' of a good dear friend who has been running a couple of SMF forums for about a decade, I have (at least temporarily), taken on the task of Administering them until other suitable humans from the 2 x forums communities, can take over.

The 2 x forums are running happily on a 4gb Dual Xeon CentOS 7 VPS and everything appears to be working fine.

Whilst I do have access to the Database & tables etc via phpMyAdmin,.. I figured I should also Try out and make a Backup of the 2 x forums using the in-built SMF tools.

In so doing, one of the Forum backups went perfectly smoothly, as expected,.. wheras the other Main forum, did not,.. and produced this error:



and the Backup process terminated and did Not produce any output,... obviously

To be honest, that Error message does not (perhaps obviously), help me LOL
I Have gone looking for the file and it certainly appears to Exist, IN the suggested location, so am atm, somewhat bereft of Ideas let alone knowing what may need to be done to resolve/fix the 'Issue'.

Please understand,.. I AM Not a Forum Guru, by any stretch of the imagination, but AM learning, but my Only previous (and ongoing) experience, is with phpBB.

The recently deceased friend, who ran these forums was virtually a 'PolyMath' and was a serious Programming specialising in Assembler, which is one of the forums, the other being for 'Bespoke Cutters & Tailors' see here:

masm32 dot com
movsd dot com

I tried 'posting' links to the forms, as suggested but it would not let me ??
Details, as requested:
The MASM forum is running SMF 2.0.13 with XHTML & WAP2
The 'Bespoke Cutters & Tailors forum is running SMF SMF 2.0.11 with Simple Audio Video Embedder & XHTML & WAP2

MySQL Version    10.2.44-MariaDB
PHP version: 8.1.16

Thanking you in advance .. I have other questions but will wait to try and sort this issue first
cheers,
Stewart

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Do not rely on database backups done through SMF. It is sadly not a reliable tool, and if you have any other option such as doing it through your hosting control panel or Phpmyadmin, you should do so.

Do you have FTP or Host control panel access to the sites?

[stoo23]

Thanks Aleksi,

Understood ,.. as suggested, I just thought I would try it

Yes I do, log in is via WHM and I haveC-Panel and ftp access.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Then you are a lot better off using Phpmyadmin, I believe that is usually available through cpanel and lets you export database contents directly.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

You should have a backup utility in cpanel, that's usually best way to go.  PMA will sometimes choke on large databases.