Unable to create a backup: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive – Plesk Help Center

Applicable to:

Backup is created with the following warning:

PLESK_WARN: Not all the data was backed up into /var/lib/psa/dumps successfully. Total space: 915.00 GB; Available space: 857.00 GB; Mounted on: /. /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/sw-tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive Try '/usr/lib/plesk-9.0/sw-tar --help' or '/usr/lib/plesk-9.0/sw-tar --usage' for more information.
Tar 1.28-2.1 or Tar 1.29b1.1 package is installed:

# dpkg -l | grep tar
ii tar 1.29b-1.1 amd64 GNU version of the tar archiving utility
Plesk Onyx 17.8 is installed in Debian 9 or Ubuntu 16

Product issue:

#PPPM-9811 "Custom buttons that have their own icons, as well as files whose names start with the dash character are now backed up without warnings."
Fixed in:
- Plesk Obsidian 04 June 2019 (fixed as PPP-39844, Linux)

Please consider updating your server:

If update is not possible for some reason you may try the following

temporary solution

Subscribe to this article to get a notification once the bug fix will become available.

As a workaround:

Connect into the server via SSH
Backup Storage.pm and TarBundle.pm files:

# mv /opt/psa/PMM/agents/shared/Storage/Storage.pm{,.bak}
# mv /opt/psa/PMM/agents/shared/Storage/TarBundle.pm{,.bak}
Download and apply fix with the following commands:

# wget -O /opt/psa/PMM/agents/shared/Storage/Storage.pm https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/article_attachments/360019874834/Storage.pm
# wget -O /opt/psa/PMM/agents/shared/Storage/TarBundle.pm https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/article_attachments/360019874854/TarBundle.pm

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