I never attempted any manual back ups, instead I went straight into scheduling automated backups. Cron was the very last thing to be implemented as per the setting up moodle guidelines from this site as itdoes say that Cron is very important and must not be missed. The instructions were followed as per in the Cron Windows link above and other related links from this page.
One of my previous posts did say that a manual backup had been tried (and was successful) in another moodle testing environment (moodle2) that we have running. This was using 2.3 but has since been upgraded to 2.4 when this became stable. This is using the same system architecture as the current moodle version (moodle1) which has the backup issue.
Since our conversations I have logged on to moodle2 and noticed that the backup log for the scheduled automated backups is reporting an OK status (the automated backup is implemented in exactly the same way and uses the same cron method as that of moodle1) - it must have just needed time to let it run rather than forcing the issue.
I did also try running the cron via web interface but this didn't work either.
I'm a little confused, going back to one of your posts a few posts back where you provided a link to a known issue in moodle as well as asking about how the course format was setup. I was of the impression that you were aware of a link between the error message 'error/baseelementchildnameconflict', the moodle version being used and how my courses are setup, hence asking the questions you did. Is there such a connection as from reading the bug explanation, it seemed to refer to restoring rather than backing up?
Thank you again.
Michael