by g k.
Thanks for the suggestion. I am running Moodle 2.4.1+. This was upgraded from 1.9. The site was backing up automatically by cron and then at some point it stopped. I am not sure why. I was running the grid format for awhile. I add this because I have read that this plugin has caused trouble. I am running some additional plugins. I increased the max execution time in phpini to 3600. This has had no effect.