Wordpress Plugins & Backups Not Running Quite Right

So I just fired up a new droplet running Ubuntu 15.10x64 and I’m setting up a Wordpress environment. I am setting it up from scratch without a Wordpress image.

I followed a lot of the tutorials here on Digital Ocean to get setup, and the site is running pretty well. I did not setup the extra layer of security with a ‘wp-user’ user and group because I was getting a lot of permissions issues.

I can upload images, etc. fine and install plugins. However, I noticed that the there may be something wrong with permissions for plugins. I am running Wordfence for security and a plugin called Backupwordpress for DB and full site backups.

Backupwordpress writes the backups to wp-content/uploads/backupwordpress.. but when I run a back up it runs as if its completing a backup, but the backup never shows. When I check the uploads folder there is nothing there… No errors, nothing.

My uploads folder is owned by $username:www-data as well as the backupwordpress folder with the permissions: drwxrwxr-x

I’ve also noticed that Wordfence won’t run any security scans, but again no actual errors.

The plugins folder has permissions of drwxr-xr-x.

Any idea what I’m doing wrong? I use these plugins on a very regular basis (literally everyday) and have never encountered this so it must be my server environment. Also, are there any security issues I may have created while trouble shooting based on these usergroups and permissions?

Thank you so much.