The underlying error for backups that are silently hanging can often (maybe even always?) be revealed by setting the backup destination to dom0 instead of a VM:
opened 11:47AM - 25 Jan 25 UTC
C: core
P: default
needs diagnosis
affects-4.2
### Qubes OS release
Qubes OS 4.2
### Brief summary
Some fatal errors during … a (CLI or GUI) backup cause the backup system to suppress the relevant exception or error message and it just silently hangs forever, e.g.:
- https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/7411
- https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/7567
- https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/7797#issuecomment-2613127199
### Steps to reproduce
Using the deprecated 'file' driver as a convenient way to reproduce the problem:
qvm-pool add hang-pool file -o dir_path=/var/tmp/hang-pool
qvm-create -l red -P hang-pool hang-vm
qvm-create -l red dest-vm
qvm-start hang-vm dest-vm
qvm-backup --yes --passphrase-file=<(echo foo) -d dest-vm /var/tmp hang-vm
### Expected behavior
`qvm-backup` quickly fails with the message `Backup error: file pool cannot export running volumes`, **like it does when backing up to dom0** (without `-d dest-vm`).
### Actual behavior
It hangs forever at `Making a backup... 0.17%`. No errors in the dom0 or dest-vm journal.
Make sure that your destination path in dom0 has enough free space for the set of problematic VMs.
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