Scheduled backups failing in Plesk 9.5

If you are using MySQL 5.5 with Parallels Plesk 9.5 then you might have noticed that scheduled backups using the built in backup utility have stopped working.

Backups manually initiated through the Parallels Plesk control panel interface run normally, but they don’t run automatically on the configured schedule. This is thanks to some compatibility issues between the Parallels “backupmng” tool and MySQL 5.5.

A quick fix for this is to adjust the “backup_day” column of the “BackupsScheduled” table in the “psa” database to change the type from “int(10) unsigned” to “int(11)” with the following SQL statement:

ALTER TABLE BackupsScheduled MODIFY COLUMN backup_day INTEGER;

Once this query has been run, you should be able to set up the scheduled backups as normal through the Parallels Plesk interface and they will run without problems or requiring manual intervention.