Backups blocked at one point

I have a trouble since several week to backups my Qubes with qubes os 4.1

I have an external hardrive that I have, it’s connected to my sys-usb qube, I don’t change it to any other qube while backing up.

So when I’m doing my backups at first everything looks fine, until at one point when for ever reason the percentage will not move for several hours, and when on the file manager of sys-usb, my hardrive will not even show anymore, I don’t know if it’s an hardware problem, or a software problem.

What log can I look to understand what it’s happening ?

Maybe the VM doesn’t have enough RAM or hard disk space?

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Might want to try the --no-compress option to see if it helps.

I have had a somewhat similar problem with R4.0.4. Perhaps it’s related?

My issue was that the USB disk device was somehow partially dismounting and then the backup process just hung while waiting for a write to complete. There does not appear to be any kind of deadman’s switch/timer while writing so it just hangs indefinitely. If I fully dismount the drive and then remount it then the backup has continued when the destination became writable again.

This only seems to happen if I am using the seprate controller assigned to sys-usb and it doesn’t matter which physical drive is attached. But if I use a built in dom0 controller and pass the same USB device to the sys-usb everything works just fine. For now that is my workaround for all long running (>90min) backups.

I have had a really hard time finding a working 4x multiport USB controller. One older chipset (don’t have that info available right now) only works in dom0 (fedora-25) and not fedora-3x as the kernel support for it seems to have been removed. The 2x USB board I now have mostly works except for this bizarre backup issue. It used to work just fine with no issues so I’m not sure what/when that exactly changed. A forced system failure/upgrade along the way also complicates the determination of the root cause.