Remote Borg backup via SSH fails with mysterious error messages

[bra1n]

Hey everyone,
I've tried to set up the remote backup via Borg / SSH as described in the guide:

• I've set up an SSH server with Ubuntu, installed borgbackup and created a user "borg"
• I've added the public SSH key from Weblate to this user and created a home and backup directory, /home/borg/translations
• I've configured the following SSH Backup in my Weblate instance: ssh://[email protected]:22/home/borg/translations

When I add the above config and try to run a backup, all I get back is an error that says There was error while performing backups: missing in performance reports. The Weblate console (I'm running it in a Docker container) doesn't output any errors.
I've also tried manually initiating the borg repository at the same path with an empty encryption key, but then I get the error A repository already exists.

So I'm kinda stuck now, because I've followed the instructions to a tee and yet it doesn't work. :-( Any ideas?

For reference: borg is at 1.4.1 and Weblate is at 5.1.4

[nijel]

The erorr message is confusing, "missing" is shown when there are no logs for an active backup. #16688 improves that.

Backups are performed in the background, so maybe your Celery worker is not running?

[nijel]

Maybe the backup was not yet triggered? You either do it manually, or it happens automatically once in a day.

[bra1n]

I already get the "missing" error when I add the config. When I manually trigger the backup from the UI, the error doesn't change (rather it gets repeated) and the queue keeps growing without seemingly being processed properly.

[nijel]

The backup worker processes tasks sequentially, so it might take time until all of them are handled if you played a lot with backups.

[bra1n]

Alright, I have tried it once more, from scratch, and after still getting the initial "missing" error, manually triggering a backup seems to have worked.
What I notably did different from the guide: I've provided an existing subfolder for the newly created user to store the translations in, since the guide doesn't specify what exactly the "/path/to/backups" is supposed to be pointing at.

[nijel]

Improvements to the documentation are welcome; you can edit it at https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate/blob/main/docs/admin/backup.rst.

[bra1n]

Done 😄 #16735