Troubleshooting steps

  • Upgrade your disk space plan from your hosting account if you can. Your site obviously needs some extra disk space due to its size or needs. So it pays off if you upgrade disk space so your site can continue working properly. Once your host increases your disk space, you should be able to access your site and WP-admin immediately, which makes the rest of the troubleshooting below easier.
  •  Start deleting some unused large files from your site (not necessarily Prime Mover packages or files). These files might be left from some ancient backup (another plugin, etc.) that has never been used. So, it might be good to check if these files exist and delete them via FTP.
  •  The next thing to do is to manually keep a copy of all your Prime Mover backups on your local computer. You can do this via FTP by navigating to  (if your site is single-site) /wp-content/uploads/prime-mover-export-files/1/  or (/wp-content/uploads/prime-mover-export-files/{blog_id}/ if multisite)
  • Find all files with WPRIME extension and download it to your Desktop. This way, you have extra backups on your local desktop computer without worrying that you might accidentally delete these backups from your site.  If you want to protect these backups further, you can even put them in cloud storage like Google Drive or Dropbox so there are multiple copies of backups.
  • [OPTIONAL] – if your site is multisite with backups in different subsites, you can find backup folders for each subsite, e.g., for subsite with blog ID: 2 and so forth, it will look like /wp-content/uploads/prime-mover-export-files/2/ OR ( /wp-content/uploads/prime-mover-export-files/{blog_id}/-replace {blog_id} with your subsite blog ID). Manually download these backups as well if they exist. Repeat the process until all backups are downloaded to your local Desktop.
  •  If you want to delete some Prime Mover files from your site, you can start deleting the temporary files. Return to /wp-content/uploads/prime-mover-export-files/1/ or (/wp-content/uploads/prime-mover-export-files/{blog_id}/ if multisite) and delete all folders. Do not delete files with WPRIME extensions. Folders are temporary – they should not exist and can be deleted. However, you should not delete any WPRIME extension using FTP.
  • Check if you are now able to access your site and WP-admin. If it’s still not working, start deleting your old Prime Mover backups until you can regain your WP-admin access.
  • Once you can log in to your wp-admin, go to Prime Mover -> Packages. Click “Refresh Packages.” If there is an error on corrupt packages, manually delete them via your FTP.
  • Once all packages are shown without any corrupt packages, these are your clean backups. You can manually delete very old backups to free up some disk space.

Tips and suggestions

  • It would be best if you consistently upgraded to a higher disk space plan (from your hosting account) to fit your website needs and avoid this issue in the future.
  • Whenever you export a site (even to your Downloads local folder) – it will use some disk space because Prime Mover will archive files (plugins, media files, database, etc.) into a WPRIME package.
  • To reduce the size of the exported package – you can export only the database. This is typically true if you don’t change the media files, plugins/themes always. And do a full backup only once a month (depending on plugin update frequency)
  • In the PRO version, you can exclude large files and folders from your backup, reducing its size.
  • In addition – you can exclude plugins from your backup in the PRO version.
  • Also, in the PRO version, you can export your backups to Google Drive and Dropbox. This way, your backups are stored in external storage. If you need to, you can delete all redundant backups on your server to free up disk space (since you have backups in the cloud). 
  • Finally, suppose you have already downloaded all-important Prime Mover backups on your local computer and want to clean up your site of all Prime Mover packages. In that case, you can delete all of them at once by following this tutorial.

Do you still need assistance?

If you still need technical assistance, please let us know. To speed up technical assistance, you can share your SFTP access or WordPress admin access if you are still unable to access your site after following all the above steps. Please send it via our technical support contact page.

Last updated: November 30, 2024

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