I use the amazing WordPress Database Backup wordpress plugin to create backup of my WordPress database. The latest version, powered by WordPress 2.2, can email you a daily backup of your MySQL database using WordPress cron system. I have configured WordPress Database Backup wordpress plugin to email the database files weekly, but for the last 2 weeks, I received no backup email! I tried to create an on-demand backup (which went well), but still got no email… and it was not a plugin bug at all!

I checked out various forums where it was suggested that a new version of the plugin fiuxed the issue. I was already using the latest version of 2.1.2. I reupdated my plugin, but still no emails were being sent.

Then I figured out what the problem was. It was not a plugin bug at all. Maybe my database file was too large and my email address did not allow huge attachments. I checked that Gmail allows you to send and receive messages a maximum of 20 MB in size (including attachments). Then I tried sending the backup to my Yahoo mail account, but still no luck (The free Yahoo! Mail account has even lower limits of 10MB per message only! Mail Plus users limits upto 20MB)

I remembered my experience while upgrading to WordPress 2.1, I had got a huge database file of 41MB! I checked my previous database files over the weeks, they vary from 2-7 MB. So maybe the database file was so huge that it crossed the email maximum size limits and never reached me.

I checked that there were over 23000 spam comments blocked by Akismet waiting clearance. So indeed the database table size would be huge. Then I used my trick of deleting Akismet spam to reduce database file size.

And did it work? Of course it did. The database was backed up much faster, was error free and I have a 2.7MB .sql.qz file sitting in my inbox right now!