In a site with some courses... As an admin go to: Site administration / Courses / Backups /  Automated backup setup Set setting "backup_auto_active" to "Manual" Enable every day in backup_auto_weekdays Set backup_auto_hour to a time very soon to happen. Set $CFG->noemailever = true; in config.php Wait until the backup_auto_hour time has passed. Change lib/moodlelib.php to add a var_dump($messagetext) inside  email_to_user() function. More or less like this: diff --git a/lib/moodlelib.php b/lib/moodlelib.php index 18e7a74cef5..ee375c9efd4 100644 --- a/lib/moodlelib.php +++ b/lib/moodlelib.php @@ -5818,6 +5818,7 @@ function email_to_user($user, $from, $subject, $messagetext, $messagehtml = '', $usetrueaddress = true, $replyto = '', $replytoname = '', $wordwrapwidth = 79) { global $CFG, $PAGE, $SITE; + var_dump($messagetext); if (empty($user) or empty($user->id)) { debugging('Can not send email to null user', DEBUG_DEVELOPER); Run php admin/cli/automated_backups.php Verify the output contains: ================================================== Courses: 2 OK: 2 Skipped: 0 Error: 0 Unfinished: 0 Warning: 0 Automated backup pending: 0 Backup completed successfully (The numbers do not matter, but it should have : instead of ; )