Since I moved my hosting location I had some problems to schedule backups with the WordPress DB Plugin.
Simple Task: I wanted to create backups of my DB and have it emailed to me once a week.
This used to work great with my old hosting environment.

Eventually I discovered that I did not receive any more backups.

Doing backups manually (and downloading them) worked fine. If I decided to not not download them, but to email them, I got an error stating:

Only variables should be passed by reference

Oh well, that did not sound good. The error wasn’t that helpful either.

Some sketched solutions I tried (and didn’t work) were:

• Increase memory limit
• Rewrite some plugin code

I don’t want to go into the embarassing details here, because the solution was … ehhhh … simple.

Solution

In the managing UI of my provider (hosteurope) you can define a standard email adress, which I did not know of. Set it and everything worked fine! The email adress configured within wordpress does not seem to suffice.

I am a little sad, that this wasn’t obvious from the logs or the UI. Or the provider could have simply predefine a standard adress, that would have reached my primary adress (catch all).

Funny thing is, that I did find this only because I was about to install some other DB backup tool, that pointed me to that potential problem.