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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#15404 Database tables corrupt

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
n/a
PHP version
n/a
Akeeba Backup version
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Latest post by oorzaak on Thursday, 04 April 2013 08:50 CDT

oorzaak

Mandatory information about my setup:

Have I read the related troubleshooter articles above before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Have I searched the tickets before posting? Yes
Have I read the documentation before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Joomla! version: 2.5.9
PHP version: 5.3.3-7+squeeze3
MySQL version: 5.1.66-0+squeeze1
Host: (optional, but it helps us help you)
Akeeba Backup version: Just upgrading to latest when this happened

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: Please attach a ZIP file containing your Akeeba Backup log file in order for us to help you with any backup or restoration issue. If the file is over 2Mb, please upload it on your server and post a link to it. => where can I find it when Akeeba does not get past the error message as described below?

Description of my issue:

Hi Nicholas,

On one of my sites, I made a backup which I could not restore. After some attempts I decided tot de-install and re-install Akeeba. Now I get this error message:

---

Your database tables are corrupt.
Akeeba Backup has detected that its database tables are corrupt. This indicates a problem with your MySQL server. Please make sure that your host has at least MySQL 4.1 (5.0 or later recommended). Then try uninstalling and re-install the component. Backups can not be made unless this problem is fixed.

---

Which steps would you advise to get going again? 

By the way: the hosting of this site shows several issues. We intend to move the site to a better hosting environment. But in order to do so we need a good backup...

 

Kind regards, Frits

(ps I heard you are coming to the Joomla Days in The Netherlands next month? Looking forward to see you!)

 

 

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

Hello Frits,

I'd recommend reinstalling version 3.7.2 twice and reloading the Akeeba Backup Control Panel page two times. That should solve this issue.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

oorzaak

Hi Nicholas,

This helped indeed, thanks!

Just one issue left, though. When I try use site transfer I get this error message about "Your FTP/FTPS/SFTP directory is not defined correctly." I re-entered the details a few times so I am absolutely certain that they are correct. 

Do you have any advice on this issue as well?

 

Frits

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

The directory you have provided in the Site Transfer Wizard does not correspond to the URL you entered below it. These two must match, i.e. files uploaded to the specified directory must be accessible from the specified URL.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

oorzaak

Ow, I'm sorry but it seems that I am back at square one: Akeeba does do it's job again but I cannot restore the resulting backup. That is: the backup and restore process seems to run fine (execpt for the site transfer not working, see my former message) but when viewing the restored site it has an error message which is not on the live site:

Error while loading the component: com_contact, 1

(I translated the message into English as this is a site with localized language settings)

 

I hope that you have any idea about how to solve this problem.

Please note that I think that the hosting of this site is a bit cheapy and possibly suspicious, so the problem may not be within Akeeba. The site is slow and recently we had some other problems as well.

 

Kind regards,

Frits

 

Edit: the error message from the restored site is consistent: it is the same message which I got in the beginning, before re-installing Akeeba.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

OK, that's news to me. I didn't even know you had this issue. I need you to ZIP and attach your backup log file.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

oorzaak

Well I did not exactly describe the problem in my first post, I just mentioned that "I made a backup which I could not restore." Which I hoped to solve by re-installing Akeeba, which failed. And so on.

I've attached the logfile as a zip, hope this helps.

 

Frits

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

Yes. Look. If you tell me "I had a problem, so after a while I found myself taking a walk at the beach. During that I fell into the sea. What can I do to get dry again?" I will certainly not be able to guess that what you need help with is the problem which made you take a walk at the sea or the nature of said problem. I will just give you instructions on how to dry yourself. I hope you see the analogy here :)

As far as I can see from your log file everything is backed up correctly, including com_contact. This makes me think that you tried restoring your site on top of another, existing site. If this is the case please try removing all files and folders from the target site before restoring the backup.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

oorzaak

Nice analogy ;-) I just thought that having Akeeba running again would solve all.

I did remove all files and data from the target account before restoring, and I also restored the backup on a fresh local (MAMP) space where I got the same error message.

Then would it be possible that the problem is in the live site though it does not show there at present? 

 

Frits

 

Edit: before turning to you for help, I asked the hosting provider to check the database because of the Akeeba error message pointing at the database tables. They told me the database was fine. I should add that they looked at it strictly from the point of view of having a healthy MySQL database, which is not the same as a healthy Joomla database.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

I honestly have no idea why you get this kind of error message. Are you sure the components/com_contact folder is present?

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

oorzaak

Yes it is, both in the live site and in the restored site, and it seems to me that there are no files missing. Also, I am quite convinced that I do not make a call for this component on the Home page and yet the message is there (though there is a menu item which points at a contact).

Well, at first I thought that there was a problem with the restored site, or rather with the process of creating it. But now I think I should examine the live site instead. Which is, I assume, beyond the scope of the Akeeba support. So I thank you for your help and I'll try to remember to report the solution of this issue in this support ticket.

Kind regards, Frits

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

This is a weird issue indeed! I would suspect a third party module or plugin on the page doing something funky. I hope my hunch is right and that helps!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

oorzaak
Hi Nicholas,

I promised that I would give you an update about this issue. I discovered some issues with the Community Builder user table by running the built-in CB tools. Also I realized that I had not upgraded CB to version 1.9. So I upgraded and I ran the database repair scripts. Wowie, the overall speed of the site increased and I could make a backup with Akeeba again. For one day.

The speed is consistently better now, though still not as good as it should be. But creating a backup gives the same issues as before.

I've talked with the owner of the site and he decided that CB can be disposed of if necessary. Also, there is a jFusion connection between Joomla and a phpBB3 forum. This one is under suspicion as well because it also handles user data. The number of users who need front end access to both the site and the forum turned out to be much smaller that we expected anyway, so maybe we'll delete jFusion as well.

But it is hard to predict if this will solve my issues. So at this moment I am in the process of creating a copy of the site by ftp download and database export/import. On this copy I'll check what happens if I de-install those extensions. And other extensions as you suggested earlier.

If you happened have other suggestions, of if you'd like to taken a look at another faulty backup file, please let me know.

Kind regards, Frits

ps When using the new ANGIE restore script - not on this site but on otherwise healthy sites - I sometimes get a php error message, I forgot to copy it; I'll send it to you if I see it again. Yet the restore process seems to run ok.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
OK, I can see something right there. All forum bridges store absolute URLs (and sometimes absolute paths) to the Joomla! and phpBB installations. I suspect that's what is going on. If you have to disable something for testing, that'd be jFusion.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

oorzaak
Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for this suggestion, I'm in the process of making a new backup right now.

Meanwhile, something else came to mind. From this particular site I can not run the Site Transfer Wizard. It always stops at the stage of testing the remote ftp folder, though I am very sure that I do not make any mistakes while entering the details. I never had this problem with other sites.

Frits

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Hello Frits,

There can be two explanations about the Site Transfer Wizard issue:
  • The server has a firewall which prohibits outbound connections to your FTP server. Yes, it happens a lot (unfortunately).
  • The test works by uploading an image to the remote FTP server and then trying to access it over the web. If the generated file gets wrong permissions (some braindead Plesk servers give 0600 permissions) it will fail. It will also fail if the URL to the remote site is wrong / doesn't correspond to the FTP directory you're using.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

oorzaak
Hi Nicholas,

In Extensions management I disabled all jFusion related extensions except for the latest forum posts module. I wanted to wait with disabling this one because it is supposed to be very important on the site.

Now Akeeba backup/restore renders the same front end error but a different one when trying to log in to the back end:

JAuthentication: :__construct: Cannot load authentication libraries.

(This is my translation of the error message which is in Dutch on this site).

Also, over the past hours I've made a copy of the site by ftp download and export/import of the database. I started this before switching off jFusion. The restored site shows exactly the same errors as the Akeeba backup/restore of that moment.

Which leads me to what puzzles me most of all: although the original site is slow and seems not stable, it does not show these errors. They only occur in the copies.

Kind regards,
Frits

oorzaak
Thanks for your explanation about the Site Transfer Wizard.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
There is definitely a plugin killing your site. Save from line by line debugging I don't know of any way to track down the issue :(

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

oorzaak
Ok, thanks. I'll let you know how this story ended.

Frits

oorzaak
Hi Nicholas,

Here's another update on this story, I thought you might be interested.

First of all, after deinstalling jFusion on the live site the admin panels of the live site became inaccessible as well. This renders the same error message as earlier on the test site:

JAuthentication: :__construct: Cannot load authentication libraries.

Well, that did it for me. I started to rebuild the site from a clean Joomla install on a different location while keeping the live site as it is. I agreed with the owner of the site not to install any user-related extensions on the new site (notably Community Builder and the jFusion bridge to phpBB3). These seemed to be a source of troubles and the number of users who needed them turned out to be limited.

But we do want to have a module on the Joomla site which shows the latest phpBB3 posts. I decided to use a stand-alone module for this instead of the module which came with jFusion. So I installed a module by Elbase / Dacian Strain. Then I found out that I could not access the phpBB3 database from an other domain. That in itself is not such a big problem. But as a result of this I discovered that it is the lack of a connection with an external database which causes this error message:

Error while loading the component: com_contact, 1

So this error message is rather misleading. Maybe there's a way to report this to the Jooma core development team. I'll ask in the Dutch Joomla community if someone could help me to get this message across.

Kind regards,
Frits

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Hello Frits,

This is very interesting and I can't understand how this error message is generated :s I believe this should only happen if the third party module is doing something crazy, like getting the global Joomla! database object and altering it.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

oorzaak
Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for your reply. The current third party module (Elbase / Dacian Strain) is a different one from the one that was installed earlier (jFusion). But both were made for the same task and maybe one developer 'borrowed' some code from the other.


Frits

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
It's possible, but in any case I'd follow this up with the developers of those plugins before filing a bug report with Joomla!. I don't believe it's core code causing this error message which means that it will go unfixed if reported only to Joomla!.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

oorzaak
Thanks, I will do that.

Frits

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