WP Time Capsule is a helpful plugin we use for our Self-Managed WordPress hosting plans. With it, you can create a copy of your website and save it to a special staging area. In that staging area, you can run tests and update themes and plugins in the website copy, without having any updating issues affect your live website. We can find the issues (if any) that arise with the latest theme or plugin updates and know which ones need further attention or if we can go ahead and complete the updates on your actual live website.
If you're having trouble setting up a staging area (i.e., if the site copy doesn't ever seem to finish copying over to the staging area and just clocks and clocks), the issue can happen because of an overload of data the system is trying to copy over to the staging site area, especially if your site content is massive. In order to get the staging copy to finish processing, you may need to adjust some of the settings within WPTC.
STEP 1
First, if you're in the middle of a copying to staging area that won't finish, click Stop to end the staging copy.
Next, go to Dashboard > WP Time Capsule > Settings
Click on the Staging tab
Where it says "Deep Link replacing limit," you can change the default 5000 to a lower number such as 500 or 100. Then click Save Changes, and go back to the WP Time Capsule > Staging area to run the copy again.
That may be all you need to get the site copy to save to the staging area and complete the process so that you can log into the staging area and test-run your website theme and plugin updates.
--
STEP 2
If the Deep Link Replacing Limit setting change doesn't work, the next step is to change the backup settings to exclude uploads. Not including uploads from backup of the staging copy of the site generally makes the staging copy process go faster.
For that, go to WP Time Capsule > Settings and click on the Backup tab
Where it says "Include / Exclude content," click on Folders & Files - this should open a drop-down menu of options to include or exclude from the backup.
Click on the arrow / triangle to the left of wp-content, so that it expands to a secondary drop-down menu. Hover over "uploads" so that the word Exclude displays to the right of that folder.
Click on Exclude. (To put it back into the backups, hover over "uploads" and click on Include)
Click on Save Changes button
Once you've made these changes to your WP Time Capsule settings, go back into WP Time Capsule > Staging and re-run the copy. That should make the process go faster and be able to avoid getting stuck.
--
STEP 3
If you're still unable to get the staging copy to finish running, you can send a report to the WPTC plugin developer. Go to WP Time Capsule > Activity Log, find your most recent backup attempt and click on "Send report to plugin developer." That button sends them a report and they will email back with help.
- 1 Users Found This Useful