Storing large amount of files always crashes and corrupts qubes, is there something I'm doing wrong?

During a fresh install of qubes I create a new vault and make this size about 800gb on a 4.0TB drive. Then I pull in about 600GB of my raw files from my external backup drive.

In the beginning of a fresh install everything is fine. Then usually what happens is after 2 weeks of basic file access, not so much moving or syncing large amounts of data after the fresh install, it seems this VM and the entire os becomes increasingly unstable.

Either this VM won’t shut down, or hangs the system totally forcing me to do a hard shut down. Or I cannot shut down the system, when I hit shutdown from the start menu, it will drop to terminal as normally but just repeats “shutting down these vms” in a loop, but never shuts down. I’ve waited hours, just loops on shutting down the terminals.

More recently I was in qubes and I simply tried to open a file, and after doing so all my vms shutdown, everything from firewall to sys-usbm then dropping to terminal with many I/O errors, and saying could not find drive, then it shut down.

Afterwards I tried to reboot and heads could no longer find my boot drive. I then pulled the drive and connected it to another system and that system couldn’t see the drive. Then after two days, suddenly heads on the main system could see the drive again and allowed me to boot as normal, allowing me to backup the system fully. But I tried to shut down the vault file VM just to see what would happen, and it still hangs the system.

This is the third drive from different manufactuers, and about the 6th time I’ve did a fresh qubes install and restored my system only to eventually lead to these types of problems described.

So am I doing something wrong here? Am I somehow destroying my system and drives without knowing it?

Thank you.

EDIT:

To clarify, I’m using brand new drives each time this problem arises afterwards.

wow, you have so large drive

maybe your hard drive is too old or used too much

weird

Sounds like Shutting down domain takes a long time · Issue #5426 · QubesOS/qubes-issues · GitHub

Thanks, in this persons problem post, he says “ignores advice to increase drive in steps of 10GB”, where is this documentated? I’ve never seen this advice. Sometimes I do increase drive sizes. But during my last install I didn’t touch this drive size after the fact. But I want to consider everything.

Not sure what that’s about - I guess since it’s not easy to shrink a volume, you wouldn’t want to needlessly extend it in the first place. Hence adding just a little more space as as required. But if you do require e.g. an extra 200 GB, there’s no point in doing 20x +10 GB.

Anyway, with large total volume sizes you might be running into LVM problems on your storage hardware, which Btrfs seems to fix for some people in the ticket.

8 posts were split to a new topic: Using BTRFS in Qubes

2 posts were split to a new topic: Can Shutdown Qube With External Drive Unmounted

very nice. I didn’t know about this.