Hi there, On Tue, 14 Jun 2022, gregrwm wrote:
... interrupted BackupPC_dump. on the next invocation i got: 2022-06-12 21:35:02 Serious error: last backup /var/lib/backuppc/pc/avocado/32 directory doesn't exist!!! Need to remove back to last filled backup 2022-06-12 21:35:02 Deleting backup 14 2022-06-12 21:35:08 Deleting backup 15 2022-06-12 21:35:14 Deleting backup 16 2022-06-12 21:35:20 Deleting backup 17 2022-06-12 21:35:27 Deleting backup 18 2022-06-12 21:35:34 Deleting backup 19 2022-06-12 21:35:41 Deleting backup 22 2022-06-12 21:35:47 Deleting backup 30 2022-06-12 21:36:00 Deleting backup 32 wow. not too robust! doesn't that seem like an inordinate consequence?
Mr. Kosowsky didn't specifically address the robustness issue so I'll chime in here about that. No, it doesn't seem inordinate if you think about how BackupPC manages backups. The non-filled backups are based on a filled backup. If you don't have that, then backups which are based on it are useless so there's no point in keeping them. I think the moral of the story is that if you care about your backups, don't do what you did (nor anything like it) without taking precautions. Having said that I don't generally mess with BackupPC (whether it's in the middle of doing something or not). After a couple of false starts (which must have been at least partly my fault, while I was migrating from V3 to V4) once I got version 4 settled in it has never put a foot wrong backing up dozens of machines, which aren't even all in the same country, with tens of terabytes of data. Occasionally I recover files and directories from the backups; it's often much easier than fetching them from the backed up machines directly. I've found that doing this makes me more confident of BackupPC. That then makes it more likely that when I need to fetch more files I'll grab backups rather than go to the originals. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling I suppose, to know the recovered backed up data is exactly what I expect it to be, so I'm that much more confident that if I needed it because I've managed to lose the original then it would be there for me. I have no axe to grind. I'm not in any way connected with BackupPC development nor with the developers, I'm just a very satisfied user and I thought that a message which could be seen as critical needed something to balance it. Of course there will be faults to be fixed in any even moderately complex software. BackupPC is probably a bit more than just moderately complex, but I've found it very robust if treated with reasonable care. I check the hosts page once a day to see that the backups are all less than a day old. That's about it. If BackupPC hadn't existed I think I'd have had to create it myself. -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
