How to Cancel the UNRAID Appdata Backup While its in Progress

16th Sep 2022 Eric Stauffer

unraid

If you are running Plex or any other media player on your UNRAID server, you likely have a pretty big meta data folder that takes UNRAID a long time to back up. This is fine and well when you have the space and time for Appdata backups, but every once and again you may need to quickly stop the process to do something else.

This guide is very short, so lets get right to it.

Table of Contents

Video Tutorial

Open Up HTOP (or TOP)

Log into your UNRAID server via the command line, and open up htop.

htop

You should see a line under Command that looks something like:

/usr/bin/tar -cvaf /mnt/user/BACKUP-LOCATION/BACKUP-FOLDER-NAME.tar

Here is a screenshot of mine:

htop

You want to note the PID number on the far left. In this case its 13246.

Exit HTOP by hitting F10.

KILL the Process

The only thing left to do is kill that process number. To do that, type:

sudo kill 13246

Make sure you type your process number, not this one.

That's it. Now UNRAID will treat the backup process as complete, and automatically restart any Docker containers it had shut down.

If AppData Backup Keeps Running

In some cases you may have to kill multiple processes. If the backup process continues after typing the kill command, revisit htop and see if there is another one running.

This has happened to me a few times. Simply kill it again until there are no more PID's of tar backing up the AppData folder.

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