#103 Backup Fails with Large 700 GB Database with no errors

[Justin Thomas]

Barman seems to be configured correctly but when I run the backup the entire 700GB is synced over and then the backup fails. The only error barman shows is "error": "failure copying files ([Errno 5] Input/output error)".

I have noticed that postgresql on the server being backed up will throw an error when pg_stop_backup is called indicating the backend has been terminated but there does not seem to be a reason it terminated.
" barman@postgres WARNING: aborting backup due to backend exiting before pg_stop_backup was called" - this may be a bogus error but I included it just in case.

I have attached the output of Diagnose and Check. Please let me know if you need any additional information or if there is something I can try to help narrow down the problem.

[Biljana Jovanoski]

I got the same error, data files do get copied, streaming of wal is fine, but the backup is failed.Db is large 1.7T
How did you resolve your problem?

[Justin Thomas]

So I set this aside for much of 2020 but spent the last week tracking it down. It would appear that this particular error is related to running the backup command from the terminal and using the & to run it in the background. Specifically, the sys.stdout association between the barman backup process and the console/logfile broke because of how I was running the backup.

I was attempting to test a backup using a command similar to the following:
barman backup pg &

running this backup instead from the barman cron file in cron.d made everything work as the sys.stdout did not get disconnected.

Justin