Getting a memory error

#1

Hi everyone

Well, after fixing my cronjob once more (it seems to get its syntax changed which makes no sense whatsoever but there you go) I cannot do backups anymore.

I have less than ten vms on my ESXi host (homelab) and in between vertical backup working nicely and now, a new VM was added to the bunch. So today I wanted to fix the thing and ran vertical backup manually:
/vmfs/volumes/5a58ee90-ac2f306e-8518-002590f39cea/verticalbackup/vertical backup Jellyfin

I received this:
Listing all virtual machines
Backing up Jellyfin, id: 11, vmx path: /vmfs/volumes/SSD_Datastore/Jellyfin/Jellyfin.vmx, guest os: ubuntu64Guest
No previous backup found. Listing existing chunks
Failed to list the directory ‘/vmfs/volumes/b38f5d7f-cf4c0b07/verticalbackup/chunks/88’: MemoryError()

I read elsewhere that any process running directly on the host is limited in memory…
So can I run vertical backup on vm too? Do I increase chunk size? Or what do I do here? All VMs combined account for a good 200GB and not more… it seems weird that I would bottleneck with such a small environment.

#2

It ran out of memory because it was trying to list all chunks in the storage. You can avoid this step with the --no-chunk-listing option:

/vmfs/volumes/5a58ee90-ac2f306e-8518-002590f39cea/verticalbackup/vertical backup -no-chunk-listing Jellyfin
#3

Thank you. Might I ask what the repercussions of this switch are?

Can I just add it to the full backup string in my crontab?

#4

The downside of not listing chunks is that if a chunk to be uploaded already exists in the storage then Vertical Backup still needs one API call to check its existence.

You don’t need this option in the cron tab. You can run the initial backup manually after which subsequent backups won’t list chunks in the storage without this option.