CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am seeing a Drupal "Page not found" error when attempting to use the CiviCRM "Backup Data" feature within the "Administer CiviCRM" menu.

I have done some research and initially thought that the problem might be related to the "CIVICRM_MYSQL_PATH" setting in civicrm.settings.php. With the default setting of "/usr/bin/" I see the Drupal error mentioned above. I did a "whereis mysql" and it returned several paths, the first being "/usr/bin/mysql". I set "CIVICRM_MYSQL_PATH" to "/usr/bin/mysql"; but instead of a Drupal "Page not found" error, I then saw a CiviCRM error that said, "We could not find the mysqldump program. Check the configuration variable CIVICRM_MYSQL_PATH in your CiviCRM config file." I also tried changing this value to "/usr/bin/mysql/" (with a trailing slash) but that did not make any difference--I still got the CiviCRM error mentioned above. My guess is that the original value of "/usr/bin/" for "CIVICRM_MYSQL_PATH" is correct, as it did not report that it was unable to find the mysqldump program before changing this setting.

The Drupal log shows the following:

Type: page not found
Location: http://www.sld.tld/civicrm/admin/backup
Referrer: http://www.sld.tld/civicrm/admin?reset=1
Message: 500.shtml
Severity: warning

(NOTE: I have replaced the actual domain name shown with sld.tld here. Also, I did not post the Date, User, and Hostname fields.)

The Apache error log shows the following:

[Fri Jan 18 21:19:09 2008] [error] [client 67.176.000.000] malformed header from script. Bad header=ContentType Extension='.gz' Co: /home/sldtld/public_html/index.php

(NOTE: I have replaced the last two octets of the actual IP address shown with 000.000 here.)

I am using CiviCRM 1.8.11536 with Drupal 5.3, MySQL 5.0.45, and PHP 5.2.4. There are 1068 contacts currently in the CiviCRM database. The site is hosted on a shared server at CHIhost.com. PHP is running in CGI mode, and the web server is Apache 1.3.39.

max_execution_time is set to 60, and memory_limit is at 64M.

I eventually plan to implement a comprehensive automated backup scheme that will backup the files and databases; however, in the interim, as a stopgap measure, I need to be able to give nontechnical users the ability to backup their own CiviCRM data. I know that I could develop a temporary workaround using tools like phpMyAdmin, FTP, Cron, and others; but I am obsessing about essentially writing a feature that's already included in the software and keeping a non-working function there for everyone to see (I think it makes the users think less about this absolutely great piece of software.) For this reason, and others, I would really like to get the built-in CiviCRM "Backup Data" feature working properly.

I have searched the documentation, forums, mailing list, and asked in #civicrm; however, I have not found a solution to this problem. Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this problem?