Server(s) are Debian's ... right? ... cannot or will not use moosh? Don't answer that, you've already stated your preferences for GUI only - 80's or not.
"I followed the exact copy of Serverin."
Séverin's postings and quoting from his postings:
https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=373771#p1513009
#4 "i invoque the cli script with memory_limit=2048M (perhaps less would be sufficient)"
and in ...
https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=373771#p1512016
"Concerning backups, i've configured them to use a dedicated specified folder, and use manual launch (not automatic), skip hidden courses, and skip non modified courses from 60 days.
Then, i use a dedicated cron job to only launch the automatic backup script (admin/cli/automated_backups.php), allowing a lot of memory for PHP, and unlimited time (really 36 000)."
Have we not really changed approach to this issue? .... and expecting different/better results?
None of us know how large the courses are. Moodle really doesn't have a plugin to calculate the size of backups before attempting any backups by any means.
But moosh does ..
This for a course entitled:
214 Honor's Digital Interactive Media
Digital Interactive Media includes video, audio, photography.
If you look at the info provided ...
Course ID: 214
No of contexts: 232
Context by level:
CONTEXT_MODULE (70): 221
CONTEXT_BLOCK (80): 11
Context by module:
assign (1): 112
forum (9): 1
resource (17): 79
url (20): 29
Number of role capability overwrites: 0
Role capability overwrites by context:
Number of local role assignments: 0
Locally assigned roles by context:
Number of enrolled users: 57
Users enrolled by role:
editingteacher (3): 57
Number of groups: 2
Group statistics:
Min number of members in a group: 24
Max number of members in a group: 31
Avg number of members in a group: 27
Course modinfo size: 423720
Number of sections: 12
Section statistics:
Sections visible: 3
Sections hidden: 9
Min number of modules in a section: 5
Max number of modules in a section: 54
Avg number of modules in a section: 18
Number of grades: 6102
Number of log entries: 8512
Number of files: 4462
Total file size: 39783551842
Cache build time: 0.076740980148315
See the Total file size line?
39783551842 ... is over 300 Gig's.
On said server ... a K12 box ... I have 3 cron job'd bash shell scripts. One of them does courses such as above.
That server will *NEVER* run automated backups because there are 15 courses similar to above whose backups range from 26+ gig -> the highest 318Gig.
Until the suggested improvement that would allow selection or deselection of courses to include/exclude in automated backups comes along, the only alternative I see is CLI with bash shell scripts from moodlecode/admin/cli/ or better yet, with moosh.
'spirit of sharing', Ken