Troubleshooting backups/restores finished with Failed or Warning status

This article explains common reasons for backup and recovery failures and warnings and provides guidance on how to troubleshoot and resolve these issues.

How to view and check tasks finished with Failed or Warning status

If any of backup or recovery tasks has finished with Failed or Warning status you will see non-zero number of Fails or Warnings in the Backup statuses chart in the Overview dashboard. You can configure service reports at the Configuration → Reports tab to receive periodic emails or Slack/Teams notifications with licensing and protection/backup status for a tenant.

To find affected resources and files, please go to the Activity → Tasks tab and filter out tasks with Failed or Warning status, after that you can view each task details by clicking on them and review a failure reason or affected files.

Backup and recovery failures

Most common backup failures:

• Not authorized - the Afi application hasn't been granted permissions to backup an affected user. In such cases we advise to check if the Afi application is installed for a whole Google Workspace tenant which is a recommended configuration and not for a specific organizational units/groups. If you still prefer to install the application only for specific organizational units/groups, please ensure that the affected users are present in these units/groups.
• The attempted action requires shared drive membership - the Afi application doesn't have access to any active (not suspended/archived) Manager or Content Manager member of this Shared drive. Please ensure that the Afi application is installed for a whole Google Workspace tenant or that, at least, it is installed for one of Manager or Content Manager members of this Shared drive.
• Quota exceeded - an Afi tenant exceeds its licensed user or storage quota. Please go to the Licensing → Subscriptions tab to review the available quota and current service usage or adjust the license counts.

Most common recovery failures:

• Not authorized / The attempted action requires shared drive membership - the Afi application isn't installed for an affected user or for any active Manager/Content Manager Shared drive member.
• User not found / Shared drive is not found - an attempt to restore data to a user/Shared drive that doesn't exist on Google Workspace side at the moment. A typical scenario when this error occurs is when you backup a user, delete it in Google and try to perform an overwrite restore for this user in Afi. Since Afi doesn't recreate users or Shared drives upon a recovery, it will fail with the corresponding error. In such cases we advise to firstly manually recreate a destination user/drive on Google side, trigger a resources discovery in the Afi portal at the Service → Protection screen by clicking on the refresh icon in the top-right corner and, when the discovery is performed, select a newly created user/drive as a restore destination.

Backup and recovery warnings

In rare cases a backup task can finish with a warning when it fails to download one or more items (files, emails) from Google Workspace. The common reason why it happens is the following:

• The document is corrupted and can't be retrieved through Google API. In this case we suggest to try opening the file through Google Drive user interface, most certainly it will fail with some kind of 500 Server Error. In this case you will need to replace corrupted file in Google Drive with a correct copy from one of the previous backups.

Paused backups or restores

A typical reason for a paused backup is Google API throttling during an initial data synchronization for a resource (user/Shared drive). When the Afi service detects an elevated rate of transient errors from Google API, it pauses an affected task and automatically restarts in a few hours. After a restart such task proceeds from a saved state and continues synchronization. Paused backups usually don't require any manual troubleshooting with API throttling issues being resolved themselves in a few hours and, after an initial data synchronization for a Google Workspace tenant is performed, next incremental backups are expected to be fast and run without any disruptions regardless of a mailbox/drive size.

Also, in rare cases, a backup or a recovery task might get paused due to an accidental non-throttling related error from Google API. In such cases the task will be paused in an similar manner and usually will be able to finish successfully after the automatic restart by the service. Afi team constantly monitors paused tasks across the service and proactively investigates and troubleshoots any repeating issues.