by Ken Task.
Well, there is progress! Backup was created sucessfully so that's a plus.
One can manually remove what's in moodledata/trashdir/ without ill affects because moodle thinks it's done with whatever is in there ... there is no admin GUI utility of which I am aware to recover what's in there anyway.
Do check Recyclebin setup.
Cron job/task not cleaning up - check ownership/permissions on moodledata recursively. Is cron job run by web service user or root? moodledata is located outside of document root of web service and the only things that should be accessing is moodle code.
Safe to have all of moodledata +rwx by the globe in that case.
'SoS', Ken