Does anyone have any ideas?

it may be to big after php times out your server stops concrete 5 from doing its thing

https://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/developers/backup-a-...

Thanks for your reply, but i'm not even getting that option, just the standard edit bar at the top and a pale blue standard background!

Bizarre.. Would rather not try and manually update but may have no choice!

If you can't even get to the button then that usually means something is seriously broken or unintentionally rewritten/replaced or you don't have correct permissions to backup but you have permissions to dashboard and for some reason its not showing a you do not have permissions

either way doing a manual back-up before updating is the safest thing to do. I'd even go as far as testing the data on a test server before updating if its a big deal

The database backup page is actually somewhat of a timebomb for sites as they grow large. It tries to replicate built-in mysql functionality and dump out a sql file that you can restore, but it takes a very long time when your site has active editors and it can very easily run up against php memory limits.

I recommend using command-line tools like mysqldump through cron or periodically connecting to the database with an admin tool and backing everything up.

mysqldump is very simple, your entire script could look like this:

mysqldump -h <dbserver-host-or-ip> -p <port> -u <username> -p<password> <database-name> > backup.sql

Here's an example with those values filled in, for clarity:

mysqldump -h dbserver.hostingcompany.com -p 3342 -u concrete5_web -pP@ssw0Rd cough_drop_website > cough_drop_backup.sql

Something else you should do to help people debug this is post logs. Visit the debug page and then go to /dashboard/reports/logs/ and post the last exceptions. Then try to find your apache/nginx/whatever error log files if they're available to you.

Thanks for all the replies,

I cured it eventually by reuploading the upgraded C5 files and the backup has returned!

So all sorted!

Thanks for your time replying though all