Qvm-backup fails silently

I am running
qvm-backup -y -vvv --dest-vm backup --compress /home/user/backupdisk app

and it fails silently at the same percentage every time. I am somewhat suspecting it’s hitting some file that it can’t deal with. Is there some way to get further information? Even better is there some way to get it to ignore incompatible files?

1 Like

Since you mention “backupdisk” in your post, what is the file system of the disk you are sending the backup to?

1 Like

It’s a LUKS encrypted ext4 disk.
I’ve opened it and mounted it.
It’s an external HDD.

1 Like

The Qubes backup tool copies the raw disk of each template/qube (+ some settings related to them) and the home directory of dom0.

What is the size of your hard drive and do you have enough space there (including inodes)?

Also, something you could try is to do the backup to something else (in the qube itself or another disk) and see if it fails at the same moment, if it doesn’t it means the hard drive is at fault.

I reran the backup and now it seems to work. I suddenly got 100%. I will try it further and see if it continues to work.

1 Like

It seems flaky. I sometimes are able to backup and other times it hangs without describing what went wrong or exiting. It might be due to some disk error, not sure how I would go about fixing that. I will try the strategy of backing everything up to a local VM and then seeing if I can transfer it like a normal file to the disk.

It seems my backup tool hangs even when I don’t write to the external harddrive. It seems like it hangs at roughly the same place (36.94% vs 36.84%) in 2 different runs. I remember something similar in earlier experiments where it seemed to get stuck at the same place. The half-finished file is 15GB in size both of the last times.

I’m again wondering if there could be something about some file that causes the backup process to stall or crash.

Yeah, it keeps getting stuck on 36.84%