Can't get backups to run

[jcbeckman]

Hi,

Just installed Vimalin on Mac OS 10.15.2 for the firs time. Set everything up, but the backups would not run because I had auto snapshots enabled. Turned off snapshots and let it clean them all up. Now when I try a manual backup, it takes me to the the Archives screen and shows me the two failed attempts, but I never see any sort of evidence that any backup I attempt is started. I also tried VMs that had never had snapshots and all it does is take me to the Archive screen. Log only shows the two failed attempts, nothing else. I have tried sending Vimalin away a couple of times as well. Do I need to do something else to get this started?

[wila]

Hi,

Not sure what you mean by "tried sending Vimalin away", but it probably doesn't matter.
Your steps sound fine to me and from your report it also sounds like it all is installed properly.

Can you please email me the support bundle?

(From the help menu, select "Create Support Bundle" then email that to support@vimalin.com)

I will have a look today to see if we can find out what the problem is.
--
Wil

[jcbeckman]

"sending away" = quit the program.


I just sent the bundle to the support email address.

[wila]

Understood.

Received your support bundle, inspected it and have emailed you my answer which hopefully helps resolving this.

--
Wil

[jcbeckman]

Yes, for those playing along at home, issue is resolved. Thanks again!

[wila]

Let me add what is currently our theory of what happened.

As it looks like the vimalinWorker process got hung on sending an email, either due to a slow email server or due to a time out.
This should have resulted in writing out a nice error to the log and leave it at that.
Instead the vimalinWorker process got hung which caused the impression of nothing happening once scheduling a job.

Here this meant ending up with a lot of scheduled backup jobs.
With currently no recourse to let it run or uninstall - with clear settings option - and install again.
Neither options are ideal, so I will look into that.

If you suspect that the worker process hangs and it isn't doing anything, then it is safe to kill from Activity Monitor, it should restart and your backups will then be processed.
Of course the vimalinWorker process should not hang on such a scenario, so I will also try to reproduce this and see if it can be fixed to work as expected.

--
Wil

[jcbeckman]

OK, new, bigger problem. Backup is running (314 minutes), and the snapshot is taking forever to re-integrate. Want to let it finish, but the VM suddenly got turned off or shut down (down't know which, wasn't watching) and trying to restart it I get told "insufficient privileges." What do I do? Is it Fusion still integrating the snapshot? VMWare is still showing high CPU. I no longer have email (this is my email server so please respond here.

[jcbeckman]

I do see locks coming and going so hopefully it is still integrating. Last thing in your log is that the snapshot is being Committed.

[jcbeckman]

OK, it did finally finish, and when I closed Fusion and restarted it was able to restart the VM.

[wila]

OK, new, bigger problem. Backup is running (314 minutes), and the snapshot is taking forever to re-integrate. Want to let it finish, but the VM suddenly got turned off or shut down (down't know which, wasn't watching) and trying to restart it I get told "insufficient privileges." What do I do? Is it Fusion still integrating the snapshot? VMWare is still showing high CPU. I no longer have email (this is my email server so please respond here.

Hi,

That's a first time I hear that a VM suddenly gets turned off. (?)

Can you email me the support bundle again?
This time also include the vmware.log files from the VM bundle that was being backed up please. If there's any hint it is in there, I just need the vimalin bundle for correlating times.

Also note that I do not watch this forum all the time (and I don't get email notifications on existing threads here somehow) so email might be faster when you need support.
--
Wil

[jcbeckman]

Well, as I said, I had no email, as that was my email server. And I've uninstalled the program - even if it hadn't shut down the VM, having it go down effectively for 5 hours while the snapshot reintegrates is not going to work for me. That's VMWare's fault, not yours - why re-integration takes so long is a mystery to me. And I'm afraid the low-power machine I am using (i3) probably doesn't help (although all IO is at Thunderbolt 3 speeds).

[wila]

Well, as I said, I had no email, as that was my email server. And I've uninstalled the program - even if it hadn't shut down the VM, having it go down effectively for 5 hours while the snapshot reintegrates is not going to work for me. That's VMWare's fault, not yours - why re-integration takes so long is a mystery to me. And I'm afraid the low-power machine I am using (i3) probably doesn't help (although all IO is at Thunderbolt 3 speeds).

Gotcha, could you still email me the log files?
It's very weird that a snapshot commit takes that much time and that taking and committing a snapshot takes out your VM.
Yes I do suspect it is something specific to your environment, perhaps we can figure out what it is.
--
Wil

[jcbeckman]

The logs have been sent. If you find something interesting let me know.

[jcbeckman]

For those of you playing along at home, this has been fixed. Used an identical drive but instead formatted as HFS+ rather than ExFAT (drive came that way and I didn't notice until it was in use - didn't think it would make a difference). Backup took only 97 minutes, and VM was never unresponsive. Thanks to Wil for persevering and suggesting this fix. I now have a viable backup! Apparently the lesson here is don't use ExFAT!