title: R markdown won't load due to a missing package, 'backports', which also fails to download.
body: <p>Here I attempt to download an earlier version of 'backports' to deal with the issue. Any ideas where to look or how to approach this issue?</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; library(devtools)
  Warning message:
  package ‘devtools’ was built under R version 3.2.5 
  &gt; install_version("backports",version="1.1.0")
  Trying https://cran.rstudio.com/
  Trying http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/RWin
  Downloading package from url: https://cran.rstudio.com//src/contrib/Archive/backports/backports_1.1.0.tar.gz
  Error in curl::curl_fetch_memory(url, handle = handle) : 
  Timeout was reached
  &gt; install.packages("rmarkdown")
   Installing package into ‘H:/R/win-library/3.2’
  (as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
  
   There is a binary version available but the source version is later:
             binary source needs_compilation
  rmarkdown    1.4    1.8             FALSE
  
  installing the source package ‘rmarkdown’
  
  trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/rmarkdown_1.8.tar.gz'
  Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 2093181 bytes (2.0 MB)
  downloaded 2.0 MB
  
  * installing *source* package 'rmarkdown' ...
  ** package 'rmarkdown' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
  ** R
  ** inst
  ** preparing package for lazy loading
  Error in loadNamespace(i, c(lib.loc, .libPaths()), versionCheck = vI[[i]]) : 
  there is no package called 'backports'
  ERROR: lazy loading failed for package 'rmarkdown'
  * removing 'H:/R/win-library/3.2/rmarkdown'
  * restoring previous 'H:/R/win-library/3.2/rmarkdown'
  Warning in install.packages :
  running command '"C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-32~1.1/bin/x64/R" CMD INSTALL -l 
  "H:\R\win-library\3.2" C:\Users\jacarter\AppData\Local\Temp\3\RtmpULt4Do/downloaded_packages/rmarkdown_1.8.tar.gz' had status 1
  Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘rmarkdown’ had non-zero exit status
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The downloaded source packages are in
      ‘C:\Users\jacarter\AppData\Local\Temp\3\RtmpULt4Do\downloaded_packages’</p>