Hello

I make sometimes backups from my forum. For several years, all was fine.
Now, it seems that the entries backup is grown too big. I get following error message:

Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 262656000) (tried to allocate 393216 bytes) in /.../forum/includes/classes/Backup.class.php on line 36

As first, this is an individual server setting, that's not under the control of the forum script. Furthermore it has a different value on different servers.

Some weeks ago I had the same problem. I contacted my provider, and I was told to write "memory_limit=512M" to ".user.ini". I did that, and it worked. The backup of the entries was +160MB in size.

Please be aware, that the memory limit does not name the size of the resulting backup but the memory that is available for the PHP-script itself.

That includes the interpretation of the script code and the processed data. Even if the resulting backup has a size of "only" 160 or 170 Megabyte, the interim steps in the procession of these data beginning with reading it from the database over generating the strings that should be saved as the backup to the writing of the backup itself to the file system can allocate much more than the outcome of the script.

If you look into a backup file you will see the real data and also the part that is the SQL-query. Let's assume you have a backup file with a size of 100 Megabytes. The file contains the orders to restore the data and the data itself in a (fictive) ratio of 1/9 (10% (10MB) query strings, 90% (90MB) real data).

The backup script reads in a first step 90MB from the database. In the second step the script assembless a copy of these 90MB with additional 10MB for the queries. At that time we have 90MB a result of the database request and 90MB+10MB as the result of the string composition in the memory. Summed up it results in 190MB in our example at that point and we did not took the script interpretation and the following file writing into consideration until now.

Beside the fact that we forgot to add new tables to the backup process over the time for several times, we (Micha and me) think the backup script is more or less rudimentary and old in the meaning of it's concept. At the end we recommend to use tools like phpMyAdmin for the backup. These tools are (normally) much more advanced, robust and take cornercases into consideration which we don't know. Additionally I expect it to have automatisms to circumvent any memory limits (in case of phpMyAdmin the limits of PHP).

Tschö, Auge