The backup tool sometimes fails

anonym
2026-04-15T10:49:34Z

After clicking "Back Up" and entering the passphrase we expect a zenity dialog saying "Your Persistent Storage was backed up successfully ..." but sometimes it never appears. The failure looks like this in the test suite log:

    Then the backup tool displays "Your Persistent Storage was backed up successfully to your backup Tails USB stick!" (failed) # features/step_definitions/backup.rb:5
      try_for() timeout expired
      Last ignored exception was: Dogtail::Failure: The Dogtail init script raised: SearchError: child of [desktop frame | main]: 'zenity' application
      STDOUT:

      STDERR:


      ./features/support/helpers/dogtail.rb:93:in `run'
      ./features/support/helpers/dogtail.rb:70:in `initialize'
      ./features/step_definitions/backup.rb:7:in `new'
      ./features/step_definitions/backup.rb:7:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'
      ./features/support/helpers/misc_helpers.rb:78:in `block (2 levels) in try_for'
      <internal:kernel>:187:in `loop'
      ./features/support/helpers/misc_helpers.rb:66:in `block in try_for'
      ./features/support/helpers/misc_helpers.rb:65:in `try_for'
      ./features/step_definitions/backup.rb:6:in `block in <top (required)>' (Timeout::Error)
      ./features/support/helpers/misc_helpers.rb:145:in `rescue in try_for'
      ./features/support/helpers/misc_helpers.rb:51:in `try_for'
      ./features/step_definitions/backup.rb:6:in `/^the backup tool displays "([^"]+)"$/'
      features/backup.feature:22:in `Then the backup tool displays "Your Persistent Storage was backed up successfully to your backup Tails USB stick!"'
      execution expired (#<Class:0x00007fdc53fd8720>)
[...]

On jenkins the first instance seems to be on 2026-01-23... except that there is an instance on 2025-09-16 (it's the devel branch, so it was running Trixie).

It seems that there are two different issues leading to this failure:

Most often it was just a case of us not waiting long enough for the backing up to finish, which should have been fixed by !2744 (merged)

Rarely the GNOME Console window indicates that the process exited:

and in the journal I see this:

Jan 26 09:44:46 amnesia systemd[7245]: Started vte-spawn-57bd8d4e-1492-4312-bedc-67002eeda525.scope - VTE child process 12213 launched by kgx process 12202.
[...]
Jan 26 09:44:53 amnesia tails-autotest-remote-shell[3521]: node2247.text = r'asdf !'
Jan 26 09:44:53 amnesia tails-autotest-remote-shell[3521]: INFO:root:Result: [8129, "success", null, "", ""]
Jan 26 09:44:54 amnesia systemd[7245]: vte-spawn-57bd8d4e-1492-4312-bedc-67002eeda525.scope: Consumed 1.577s CPU time, 71.5M memory peak.

indicating that the process exited right after the passphrase was entered.