R4.0 clean install, backup hangs

Fresh install of Qubes R4.
USB device mounted to backup VM.

All VMs selected for backup. No compression.

Reproducible, backup hangs mid way, no I/O activity in backup VM (iotop). No error message in Dom0, progress bar does not increment.

Where are logs please?

Edit: /var/log/qubes/backup-vm.log has nothing useful

  1. Does this happen when you first back up to a VM and then copy to the USB device?

  2. How much are you backing up? There was someone recently here who was backing up lots of data and something would break in the process.

How much RAM did you give to your backup qube? Did you try to increase it?

Backing up ~100GB of which biggest is a ~40GB Win 2019 HVM.
System has 16GB RAM with 400MB initial / 4000MB max allocated to the backup qube. sys-{net,firewall,usb} the only other machines running.

I remember Chris Laprise made a great lvm snapshot based backup tool a few years ago, did this ever get closer integration into Qubes?

Can’t answer Q1 as I don’t have sufficient space on the local machine. How else might I rule out an issue writing directly to USB? Can some sort of debug logging be enabled?

Yes, I have been able to reproduce when backing up to an appVM with local storage, not using any USB device.

The backup hangs in Dom0 with no error and there is no I/O activity in the appVM after ~15% or so complete of a 40GB HVM.

This is still an issue for me - any advice? Moving to yet another laptop so will report back if the issue persists across installs.

That was going to be my first suggestion.

Second suggestion: Perhaps try breaking up the backup into smaller groups. For example, back up half of your qubes, then back up the other half.

Hi Andrew! Long time no speak, was on the qubes mailing list years ago and remember you were helpful. I’m going to be onboarding a few dozen users into Qubes in the next 6 months so trying to avoid/understand any pain points. This likely means looking again at Chris Laprise’ LVM based backup solution plus something lower level like Clonezilla. Would like to preserve security model by not connecting USB storage directly into Dom0.

Going to have a search around to see if there are any alternatives under discussion or if Qubes is going to change direction on this.

Will try your suggestion and also see if it’s only a problem with the Windows HVM included. Thanks again.

FYI:

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