Hi there, On Wed, 19 Oct 2022, Adam Hardy wrote:
I keep getting a problem from tar when backuppc goes to back up the localhost, which includes a removable drive in the backup targets: Running: /usr/bin/sudo /bin/tar -c -v -f - -C /media/adam/Videos-2TB/Videos --totals --newer=2022-10-11\ 13:11:32 . incr backup started back to 2022-10-11 13:11:32 (backup #1343) for directory /media/adam/Videos-2TB/Videos Xfer PIDs are now 22832,22831 /bin/tar: /media/adam/Videos-2TB/Videos: Cannot open: No such file or directory /bin/tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now readOutput: sysread returns 0 and got EOF Tar exited with error 512 () status 50% of the time, the backup works. When I run the command above as the backuppc user, it never fails. I'm not sure what to do now. The removable drive is always connected. I can only assume it has something to do with Ubuntu managing the drive somehow so that it is connected when any GUI process tries to access it, but I'm not sure why it shouldn't fail for me when I run it on the command line.
Don't assume what the problem is and try to solve it. First find it. There may be something interesting in the system logs (in /var/log/). Your subject line says "tar causing problems" but I feel sure it won't be tar which is causing the problems. I also doubt that it's anything as complicated as Ubuntu doing things for GUIs. Would I be right in guessing that it's a USB-connected drive? They've almost always caused problems for me. USB disconnects happen all the time, and for most USB devices a reconnect is fine. For mass storage devices unfortunately that's often not the case. Is the drive spinning down when not busy? That's the default for many USB devices I've seen and that often causes problems too - but you can prevent it from doing that easily enough. Maybe you'd have more luck if you run something just before the backup takes place which accesses the drive, to spin it up, if that's a problem. Are you backing up 2TB of videos? I'd probably exclude them from the regular backups. Well I've done enough guessing for one post. :) -- 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/
