Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Failed regression: missing snapshot

[Andrew Ferguson]

On Jul 10, 2008, at 7:16 PM, Dan McGuirk wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm using rdiff-backup 1.1.15 on Ubuntu.  Yesterday I unmounted my
> backup drive uncleanly (although not during a backup).  Today
> rdiff-backup wants to regress to the previous backup, but it's failing
> as follows:
>
> Previous backup seems to have failed, regressing destination now.
> Regressing to Tue Jul  8 12:08:06 2008
> Exception '[Errno 2] No such file or directory:
> '/media/backup/inspiron-linux/rdiff-backup-data/mirror_metadata. 
> 2008-07-08T12:08:06-07:00.snapshot.gz''

Hi Dan,

I suggest you use touch to create that file, then let rdiff-backup run  
and delete it to continue. That might be enough to let rdiff-backup  
continue.

Your scenario brings up an interesting issue. My gut reaction is that  
there should be a better way to handle it automatically within rdiff- 
backup. I'm surprised, however, that only a clean unmount could have  
caused this. Perhaps the kernel wasn't actually finished writing the  
files to disk, even though rdiff-backup quit? (ie, they were in the  
cache) Rdiff-backup does try to use fsync() to deal with such  
situations...

Thanks for the stack trace.


Andrew