Warnings with Backups?

TechGrips

I don't mean to come off as abrasive at all, but truly what in the world do some warnings/errors mean when it comes to VM backups?

“Unused XVA”???

“XVA might be broken”??????

Like, what do you mean ‘might’? It is or it isn't, there isn't a codified conditional check to tell me either way? It just makes zero sense to me how out of all 10+ of my VMs, most backup/copy perfectly fine, but others get tagged with these bizarre ambiguous errors... What do the developers behind these error outputs actually expect an end-user SysAdmin to do with these errors/warnings? I cannot be the only person a little frustrated by this UI/UX for backups.

I just need VM-level backups that work. Any explanation for this would be greatly appreciated.

olivierlambert

Ping @Team-XO-Backend

pierrebrunet

@TechGrips Hi,
Unused XVA means a XVA file is not linked to any metadata (to remove a backup, we first remove the metadata file linked to it, then we remove the XVA), it should be removed by clean vm step. It is not an issue, just an information.

For the second warning "XVA might be broken", this is because the compressed file seems to be corrupted but we cannot be sure. We prefer to warn the user there may be an issue in the file. This should encourage to remake a backup.

TechGrips

@pierrebrunet Hi Pierre, I really appreciate you taking the time to respond here.

Noted on the ‘unused XVA’ explanation. So the unlinked metadata is not necessary for VM recovery from a backup exhibiting this warning, right?

As for the ‘XVA might be broken’ warning, this draws some concern. For every single backup I run, atleast 1 or more VMs exhibit this message. I just ran a manual backup of all my VMs today, 4 out of 12 of them had ‘XVA might be broken’ attached to them, even for completely idle Rocky Linux web app servers. Surely users can't be expected to just continuously run subsequent manual backup jobs because of this message? What would potentially cause the compressed XVA to become corrupted? And why can't said-corruption be validated in any practical way outside of “just running backups again”?

Constantly running backups and hoping the ‘XVA might be broken’ warning doesn't show, and constantly validating past backups who had this message attached to them all sounds incredibly time-consuming. Shouldn't backups bring peace-of-mind, not hours worth of unplanned validation work? Yes of course any good admin should periodically test their backups, but doing so as often as each time this message is shown seems entirely impractical.