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On one of my ESXi's (5.1.0) the first backup, gave the following error (xsibackup 1.5.0.8):

Error code 3649 at file xsibackup.c, line 3649 | Error description: error detecting .vmdk file

I did a ls -l on that same filepath and I got results just fine.
The VM is in suspended state.
The VM has 3 vmdk files attached, each on a different storage, the other 2 were backed up ok.

For over 1 hour now it's sitting in the following state:

   21/21                                 XXXX.vmdk        486.00 B     | Done  44.76%
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Total size:                                                                     76.17 GB    | Done 100.00%
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Not sure if this is related to the error above or not.

I do have another esxi which is also doing backups during this time. That one seems to be progressing ok (also running 1.5.0.8) I assume this shouldn't have any impact but I'm putting it out there in case it does: the backed up VMs are different, but they do backup to the same place. This was working fine previously with 1.4 (both doing backups at the same time to the same NAS folder). And I am using the same scripts on both sides, so nothing changed from that POV, just the upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5.

Any ideas what may cause this issue? Maybe where to look to see what it's doing? And what I can do about it?
Safe to kill it and re-try the backup?
If I kill it, will that result in some garbage that I should manually cleanup?

Hello, just upgraded from 1.4.x to 1.5.0.8

every time I ran a backup, It says
"Remote 'data' folder does not exist, creating it..."
Target is a Synology NAS
Obviously, the folder exists, I've been running backups for months. I don't recall if 1.4.x did the same thing or not.
It doesn't seem to cause issues with the backup so it may just be a display thing.

I'm running backup manually, shouldn't matter but mentioning it, if it does.
Command is: /scratch/XSI/XSIBackup-DC/xsibackup --backup "VMs(VM1,VM2,VM3,VM4,VM5,VM6,VM7,VM8,VM9)" adm@synology-IP:22:/volume1/esxi-backups/

You can see that during backing up of VM2 it also backs up HDDs of VM1 (lines 155-165)
Same for VM3 (lines 247-257), VM4 (lines 321-331), VM5 (lines 393-403), VM6 (lines 513-523), VM7 (lines 607-617), VM8 (lines 725-729), VM9 (lines 847-851)

Checking the synology drive data, I cannot see the drives of VM1 in the VM2 folder, so I assume the backup is ok, but it's just an assumption. Can someone investigate this and confirm that doing a restore of VM2 will NOT in fact restore anything from VM1? Because that would be nasty.
Then obviously this should be fixed since it keeps processing the same hdds for every VM in the backup and while it doesn't seem to have a huge impact, it adds up.

The second potential problem are some excluded files. For ex on VM3 lines 243-245 I see what I am assuming to be snapshots being skipped (some other VMs have this as well). In theory that should be fine because this VM does not have snapshots as far as I can tell (via snapshot manager and actually checking the folder of the VM) but then where is it getting these from?

Thank you.

I'm thinking ahead off possible failures and what will happen to the backup process.
Say for whatever reason, the esxi host crashes, or the network between it and the backup destination is lost.
How does xsibackup handle such scenarios? Does it have some resume support? will it cleanup the failed backup so it can be run again?
And should I worry about garbage in the backup destination?

Hello,

I just ran my first backup, it was of a running windows VM. I will paste here some relevant lines from the output
(esxi user = root, synology user = admin)

command line: ./xsibackup --backup "VMs(xyz)" admin@a.b.c.d:22:/volume1/esxi-backups/

|||   (c)XSIBackup-DC 1.4.3.13: Backup & Replication Software                   |||
System Information: ESXi, Kernel 6 Major 0 Minor 0 Patch 0
xsibackup is licensed
Remote system: Linux
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PID: 677403, Running job as: admin
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LZJB compression has been enabled
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Block size is 1.00 MB (1048576 bytes)
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Remote xsibackup binary found at: /bin/xsibackup

Performing --backup action
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(c)XSIBackup-DC setting repository at /volume1/esxi-backups
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.xsitools file created at: admin@a.b.c.d:22:/volume1/esxi-backups/.xsitools
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Item number 1 in this job

Virtual Machine Name: xyz
Creating snapshot VM : xyz (powered on)
*** Snapshot was successfully created ***
Virtual Machine: xyz
Backup start date: 2021-03-12T10:09:42
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2021-03-12 10:09:42 | Backing up 26 files, total size is 52.46 GB
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    NUMBER                                                         FILE             SIZE          PROGRESS

following are the files transferred and the following are of interest, that is the ones that are marked excluded.

xyz-ae0ee284.vswp                    [open excluded]
vmx-xyz-2920211076-1.vswp                    [open excluded]
xyz.vmx.lck                 [skipped excluded]
xyz-000001-delta.vmdk                 [skipped excluded]
xyz-000001.vmdk                 [skipped excluded]
*** Snapshot was removed ***
Item backup completed without errors
Differential blocks were added to the .blocklog database
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Final checksum: 27167242484 bytes were sent and confirmed to have been written remotely
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Removed host <tmp> dir        OK
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Removed prog <tmp> dir        OK
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Unlocked backup               OK
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Removed PID                   OK
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Why these files were excluded?

I don't have a test VM to play around with so I used a live one; I should probably make some but am strapped for time for the next couple weeks, I'd rather get the backups working.

So another thing that comes to mind: given the VM is running and the snapshot and swap files seems to have been skipped, what will happen if I need to restore? Will it restore to the same running state? or will it be broken?

Thank you