Qubes backup UI stalls badly

[Ryan Tate]

Today I went to backup my machine using Qubes backup GUI and near the end (?) the progress bar was at 100% but the Finish button was not clickable. I waited maybe half an hour, an hour, and tried closing the window. I got an error message saying the window was not responding and asking if I wanted to force close. I said No. Now (maybe 15 minutes later) the window is completely blank.

I have previously been left without a bootable Qubes machine because I cancelled a Qubes restore. I am worried I am about to be in the same state. Is there anywhere I can check to see if there are big stray files left behind in dom0 and not cleaned up? Can I check if I’m about to have lvm issues?

Also, this is not the first time Qubes Backup has behaved oddly. I also commonly get it stuck at 99% for hours so I give up and force close. Other times, it proceeds pretty quickly to 100% and I get the Finish button clickable.

The backup is only about 90GB (uncompressed, but compressed it is somewhere closer to 50GB) and is coming off a speedy internal drive to a decent USB3 external disk. No idea why I am having these issues.

[Mike Keehan]

It was a combination of issues on my machine that caused the same thing,

1. I do not have the lvm disk setup,
2. Backing up live vms.

As long as I only back up vms that are off, it all works perfectly.
I found this answered by Marek after searching for a while.

I have restored OK too, but have only done this once. It worked fine.

Mike.