Backup and restore

Error 500's are kinda a general catch all and not very descriptive of the problem.  And you've not given anyone much to go on ... server local, remotely hosted and shared (provider), locally hosted in a virtual environment, or locally hosted as a stand alone ... operating system, etc..

But ... check permissions on the moodledata/temp folder.  It is there that Moodle must be able to access a folder called 'backup'.  The web server user must be able to create folders/files in that directory.

Check for existence of that folder and it's contents.  Anything?

Could temp files be created in the operating system temp folder?

Since it's an upgrade ... upgrade from what?

'spirit of sharing', Ken

Looking further into this, the 2.5 doc says to:

• Delete old records from "backup_ids" table: Check the table exists, repair it and try again.
• Delete old records from "backup_files" table: Check the table exists, repair it and try again.

However, those tables do not exist in my Moodle database. There is a backup_ids_template and backup_files_template. Otherwise, I found the mdl_files table mentioned in this thread: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=224252

I ran: select * from mdl_files where "component" like 'backup' 

It returned 2813 rows. 

Running theory for a fix would be to clear out the backup files listed above in the mdl_files table, and clear out the mdl_backup_controllers tables? Has anyone done that before? Is that a terrible idea?

A bit of a discovery on my particular generation of this error "cannot_finish_ui_if_not_setting_ui"

I have the topcoll format installed and the mdl_format_topcoll_settings table was not present (as I updated to Moodle 2.6 from 2.3)

Sometimes the "mdl_format_topcoll_settings table missing" error was generated with debugging turned on; sometimes the error "cannot_finish_ui_if_not_setting_ui" occurred when trying to backup a course.

I created a new table in the database using the following and my backups work fine now.

SET NAMES utf8;
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;

-- ----------------------------
--  Table structure for `mdl_format_topcoll_settings`
-- ----------------------------
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `mdl_format_topcoll_settings`;
CREATE TABLE `mdl_format_topcoll_settings` (
    `id` bigint(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
    `courseid` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
    `layoutelement` tinyint(2) NOT NULL DEFAULT '1',
    `layoutstructure` tinyint(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '1',
    `layoutcolumns` tinyint(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '1',
    `tgfgcolour` varchar(6) NOT NULL DEFAULT '000000',
    `tgbgcolour` varchar(6) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'e2e2f2',
    `tgbghvrcolour` varchar(6) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'eeeeff',
    PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=`InnoDB` AUTO_INCREMENT=1 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci ROW_FORMAT=COMPACT COMMENT='States the settings used with the given course.' CHECKSUM=0 DELAY_KEY_WRITE=0;

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1;

If using topcoll format in your course(s), check to see if the table exists, and if not, create the table, then try your backup!