backups fail for only 2 reasons, sadly neither have anything to do with Anope.
1> lack of permissions
2> lack of disk space
As far as the read error, this happens when services can't talk to the ircd. This also have nothing to do with Anope directly. If you were having problems getting anope configured for the first time it would be a little different because some configuration settings can cause this. However, if services was connected and running and you suddenly get this message, then it's not a configuration issue but a pure lack or loss of connectivity, which is something Anope can not control such as a loss of connectivity due to a poor network connection. Think of a read error as the same as a ping timeout from a client or a connection reset by peer error.