Backup Qubes Failing (write error: Read-only file system)

User Support
1

Qubes 4.0.3 backups have started failing in the last few days. I’m running the backup utility to a USB hard drive mounted to one of the appVM’s. It worked fine for a month or so, but has just started failing out of the blue. It gets to about 11% (usually around 20 GB or so), then throws this error and dismounts the drive:

Error: Writing backups to VM backup failed: cat: write error: Read-only file system

I ran fdisk and it doesn’t look like there are no issues with the drive (it’s only about a month old and was working fine before). Possibly related, I only have two USB ports, and I can only get this drive to be detected/mounted when I plug into one of them…the other doesn’t seem to work at all.

I’m wondering if anyone has any suggestions? Drive issue? USB port issue? Qubes issue?

Thanks in advance…

2

You may be able to find the answer by first saving the backup file to your VM and then copying it to the USB drive.

1 Like
3

Did you ever manage to resolve this issue?

4

Just create a folder in a AppVM, check with ls -l if it is owned by user:user if not chown user:user yourFolderName.
Attache the partition to the appVM via the yellow tray icon, mount that partition to the aforementioned folder, assuming you are in the AppVM home folder do a mount /dev/xvdi youFolderName .
Usually the attached partition is found under /dev/xvdi/ check with lsblk command and find the partition+size you attached and get the path otherwise but usually the first attachment goes to xvdi.

Now point qubes backup to the appvm folder and backups should work.