Home Assistant backups failing

lachi3tesn · February 19, 2023, 10:46am

Hi All,
I’m hoping you can help because I have no idea what’s going on.

I am trying to backup home assistant, but when I to start a backup, it looks like it’s loading for a bit and then comes up with this error

Logger: homeassistant.components.hassio
Source: components/hassio/websocket_api.py:124
Integration: Home Assistant Supervisor (documentation, issues)
First occurred: 8:17:52 PM (1 occurrences)
Last logged: 8:17:52 PM

Failed to to call /backups/new/full - Unknown error, see supervisor

When I check the supervisor logs I see this…

23-02-19 20:17:52 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.homeassistant.module] Can't backup Home Assistant Core config folder: [Errno 5] I/O error
23-02-19 20:17:52 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.manager] Backup 6e4a12bd error
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/src/supervisor/supervisor/homeassistant/module.py", line 341, in backup
    await self.sys_run_in_executor(_write_tarfile)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/concurrent/futures/thread.py", line 58, in run
    result = self.fn(*self.args, **self.kwargs)
  File "/usr/src/supervisor/supervisor/homeassistant/module.py", line 332, in _write_tarfile
    atomic_contents_add(
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/securetar/__init__.py", line 176, in atomic_contents_add
    atomic_contents_add(tar_file, directory_item, excludes, arcpath)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/securetar/__init__.py", line 176, in atomic_contents_add
    atomic_contents_add(tar_file, directory_item, excludes, arcpath)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/securetar/__init__.py", line 179, in atomic_contents_add
    tar_file.add(directory_item.as_posix(), arcname=arcpath, recursive=False)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/tarfile.py", line 2002, in add
    self.addfile(tarinfo, f)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/tarfile.py", line 2030, in addfile
    copyfileobj(fileobj, self.fileobj, tarinfo.size, bufsize=bufsize)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/tarfile.py", line 248, in copyfileobj
    buf = src.read(bufsize)
OSError: [Errno 5] I/O error
The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/src/supervisor/supervisor/backups/manager.py", line 167, in _do_backup
    await backup.store_homeassistant()
  File "/usr/src/supervisor/supervisor/backups/backup.py", line 485, in store_homeassistant
    await self.sys_homeassistant.backup(homeassistant_file)
  File "/usr/src/supervisor/supervisor/jobs/decorator.py", line 156, in wrapper
    raise err
  File "/usr/src/supervisor/supervisor/jobs/decorator.py", line 154, in wrapper
    return await self._method(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/src/supervisor/supervisor/homeassistant/module.py", line 344, in backup
    raise HomeAssistantBackupError(
supervisor.exceptions.HomeAssistantBackupError: Can't backup Home Assistant Core config folder: [Errno 5] I/O error

Please ask if you need anymore info, Thanks!

Gh61 · March 29, 2023, 6:53pm

I have the same problem, did you resolve this issue?

Deni · May 4, 2023, 8:18pm

I have the same problem… did you resolve it?

Soulman74 · June 19, 2023, 9:31pm

Ran into the same issue.
The problem seems to be that there is “a” file in the /config directory that is corrupt and cannot be read. If you open an SSH session to your Home assistant system you can find the corrupt file (and hopefully delete it if it is not a critical file).
I am not saying that the following is the best or the quickest method but it worked for me
A backup was more important than optimizing the way to find the corrupt file :).

In the SSH terminal try to manually tar the different directories/files by using “tar c -f - /config/replace this part by file or dir to check”.
This command wil start tar in a similar way as during the backup, but it will send output to the console only - so nothing is written on the file system (If you want to be 200% sure you may of course create a “test dir” and run the command from there anyway) .
On the corrupt file or directory you will receive the same read error.

Once you have identified the file and it is not critical - hopefully - it can be removed by a simple rm.
In my case it was a zigbee2mqtt log file that was corrupted… Good luck !

(edit) NOTE : as indicated below, it might be better to filter the output using a “random” grep in order to minimize console output. This would make a command look like this (example to scan zigbee2mqtt dir) : “tar c -f - /config/zigbee2mqtt | grep XXXXXXX”. Any other command that would actually read the contents of all the files recursively would actually be an option to use.

timj.pdx · June 19, 2023, 11:44pm

You don’t really want to be sending random characters to your terminal (stdout). A better approach would be ‘grep -r XXX .’. That will recursively read every file and would generate minimal output. I doubt this would help much as the file is probably just fine, it just does not contain the data that HA is expecting.

Soulman74 · June 20, 2023, 8:21am

I agree with the approach to filter the output using grep.

Not sure however what you mean exactly with “I doubt this would help much …”.
The problem faced here is only indirectly related to Home Assistant; as an external tar command is started by Home Assistant through a script.

This tar command fails due to a read error on filesystem level - so the file is corrupted and cannot be read in full. The contents are of no interest to the tar command, it is more than happy to compress almost any file as long as there is no corruption on filesystem level.
After removing the corrupted file a successful backup is made.

timj.pdx · June 20, 2023, 7:35pm

Nerdy Linux details (and a little off topic)
You should not run tar on directory when there are active processes writing to files in the directory. Linux is a asynchronous buffered file system and typically a process does not know (or care) when the data is actually written to the disk. When HA does a backup it knows which processes are writing to which files and takes appropriate action to assure that when the tar runs all the files are in a ‘good’ state.

You can run tar on an active directory but if a file changes size while the tar is reading it, the tar will fail. It may also quietly archive a incomplete version of a file. As far as Linux is concerned, you got just what you asked for.

elnney · October 14, 2023, 10:54am

To find corrupted file you can connect via ssh. then
tar -cvzf fooo.tar.gz .

tar will stop on corrupted file so the last file displayed is the corrupted.

HUK · October 7, 2024, 10:06am

I’m having a similar issue and any guidance would be appreciated.

Backups are failing when scheduled to backup to Synology NAS.
They work fine backing up to the local disk.

Supervisor logs -

2024-10-07 10:08:14.779 INFO (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.manager] Backup 0074fcac starting stage finishing_file
2024-10-07 10:09:16.105 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.manager] Backup 0074fcac error
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/src/supervisor/supervisor/backups/manager.py", line 262, in _do_backup
    async with backup:
  File "/usr/src/supervisor/supervisor/backups/backup.py", line 364, in __aexit__
    self._outer_secure_tarfile.__exit__(
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/securetar/__init__.py", line 140, in __exit__
    self._tar.close()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/tarfile.py", line 1975, in close
    self.fileobj.close()
OSError: [Errno 5] I/O error
2024-10-07 10:18:25.303 INFO (MainThread) [supervisor.resolution.check] Starting system checks with state running

I unmounted and remounted the backup location, and got these errors -

2024-10-07 10:05:16.262 INFO (MainThread) [supervisor.mounts.manager] Creating or updating mount: HomeAssistantBackups
2024-10-07 10:05:16.443 INFO (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.manager] Found 8 backup files
2024-10-07 10:05:16.455 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.backup] Can't read backup tarfile /data/mounts/HomeAssistantBackups/ec58ac34.tar: unexpected end of data
2024-10-07 10:05:16.455 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.backup] Can't read backup tarfile /data/mounts/HomeAssistantBackups/31f90b67.tar: unexpected end of data
2024-10-07 10:05:16.576 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.backup] Can't read backup tarfile /data/mounts/HomeAssistantBackups/e8a363c8.tar: unexpected end of data
2024-10-07 10:05:25.627 INFO (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.manager] Found 8 backup files
2024-10-07 10:05:25.637 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.backup] Can't read backup tarfile /data/mounts/HomeAssistantBackups/ec58ac34.tar: unexpected end of data
2024-10-07 10:05:25.637 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.backup] Can't read backup tarfile /data/mounts/HomeAssistantBackups/31f90b67.tar: unexpected end of data
2024-10-07 10:05:25.638 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.backup] Can't read backup tarfile /data/mounts/HomeAssistantBackups/e8a363c8.tar: unexpected end of data
2024-10-07 10:05:25.646 INFO (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.manager] Found 8 backup files
2024-10-07 10:05:25.654 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.backup] Can't read backup tarfile /data/mounts/HomeAssistantBackups/ec58ac34.tar: unexpected end of data
2024-10-07 10:05:25.657 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.backup] Can't read backup tarfile /data/mounts/HomeAssistantBackups/e8a363c8.tar: unexpected end of data
2024-10-07 10:05:25.657 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.backups.backup] Can't read backup tarfile /data/mounts/HomeAssistantBackups/31f90b67.tar: unexpected end of data

For someone who’s not familiar with Linux or SSH, could you please offer some help how to get this resolved?

And if it is a corrupt file - how to find it? And how to fix it?

Thank you in advance