Hi there,
On Sun, 17 Aug 2025, matth...@gmx.at wrote:
...
...
BTW1:
* is there a place where I could provide this (bash) script?
The scripts section at https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki
* sometimes I'm developing patches to BackupPC perl scripts (applyable with
patch -p0 --dry-run --
reject-file=oops.rej <file.patch) and better documented than below. Is there
a place where I
could provide them?
Github is the place.
Being an Old School greybeard I'm very comfortable with patches, but I
guess most people never use 'patch' any more. The latest thing is
'pull requests' on Github. Unfortunately more or less every time I
try to use Github's User Interface it breaks in some new and to be
frank very uninteresting way, so I tend to use git from the command
line to do any code changes on Github (and gitk to look at history).
I'm not above downloading two different versions of the whole thing as
an archive, extracting them to a temporary directory, and then running
'diff -r -U3 ...' on the two subdirectories.
The point buried beneath all this is that if you can recruit a few
people to test your patches that will help enormously. Despite my own
reservations about and dreadful experiences of Github I think you will
get better traction if (1) you use Github's facilities to publish your
changes for testing and (2) after you've made the changes available on
Github you send a message to this mailing list announcing them. In my
view it's much better to keep discussion on this mailing list than to
try to use Github as some kind of forum.
- BackupPC_backupDuplicate can need some time and the client could go to
sleep in the meantime. A
patch to??BackupPC_dump move the call of DumpPreUserCmd before execution
of
BackupPC_backupDuplicate and a users DumpPreUserCmd can disable
hibernation on client side.
- BackupPC_restore could need some time between calculation of $lastNum and
using it for
RestoreInfo and RestoreLOG. A patch move the calculation behind the call
of the
RestorePostUserCmd and if someone, like me??, is calling?BackupPC_restore
from a programm
several times in parallel for different shares and dirs of a host, each
single call can use
another?$lastNum.
All good stuff. :)
Your patch for BackupPC_restore is on Github at
https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/issues/541
I know that at some point I've at least seen something describing the
rationale behind the BackupPC_backupDuplicate patch, but I have been
unable to find it (for my TODO list:). Did you mention it on Github,
or this mailing list or somewhere...?
In general I'm much happier with changes which add functionality as an
*option* and which won't affect existing users in any way unless they
deliberately ask for the option. In both patches I'd worry much less
if you added YetAnotherDumpPreUserCmd, so if YetAnotherDumpPreUserCmd
is undefined there would be no change to the current operation. If no
Github issue yet exists, you could for example add your suggestion to
https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/issues/5
which I want to look into more carefully when I can get to it.
BTW2:
...
...
-rwxrwx--- 1014/544 415 2008-12-14 14:12:10 /home/Backup4U/.ssh/authorized_keys
...
... I don't understand the second one because
"/home/Backup4U/.ssh/authorized_keys" exists.
To be able to make a backup of a file, the user 'backuppc' (or
whatever you have set set in the variable $Conf{BackupPCUser} in
/etc/BackupPC/config.pl) needs to be able to read the file when it
tries to make the backup. Can your $Conf{BackupPCUser} read a file
which has UID 1014 and GID 544, but no 'world' read permission?
I think the main reason of this corruptions in my system was an
insufficient maximum number of open file descriptors. As soon as I
recognized this and set "ulimit -n 10000" all remaining migrations
went well.
Useful information. It seems to me that it should be possible to add
a check in the conversion script to check ulimit, maybe warn about it.
I added it to my TODO, but don't hold your breath it's low priority.
> It seems likely that your conversion of V3 backups to V4 backups did
> not go very well.? You said that there were 'issues', and that now the
> count of missing pool files is nearly two thousand.? (1.800 - is that
> right? in the UK we use comma , not decimal point . as the thousands
> separator).? You are right to want to investigate.? Are you able to
> recover a few files successfully?? Perhaps choose some at random, and
> some because they're big/small/valuable/new/old?
1,800 missing pool files found last night, in 1/16 of the pool. In total it is
more than 11,000 out
of 30,000,000. So only a few files are affected??.
I'm not sure if you're asking if I suggested that 11,000 files is only
"a few files". For the avoidance of doubt, I did not. I asked if you
were able to restore a few files but I suggested choosing the files in
a number of different ways to get a hopefully representative sample of
your success rate, as a way of checking that your backup recovery can
"sort of work" on a good day. Obviously it isn't an exhaustive test,
but I'd probably try something like that before I tried something more
exhaustive.
Probably because of filesystem corrections made by e2fsck in the
past or because of some aborted migrations, mentioned above.
I have no idea what will happen to a V3 BackupPC pool if e2fsck was
obliged to make corrections to it, but I wouldn't feel that I could
trust it without making careful tests. My personal view is that the
filesystem for your backup system must be completely beyond reproach,
and if it starts to need maintenance of that kind then it's probably
time to replace it unless there's some obvious explanation with an
equally obvious and easy fix. There was a time, decades ago, when I
spent many hours every year fixing filesystems, but in general they
are all a lot more reliable nowadays and now I can't remember the last
time I had to run any kind of filesystem fixing tool - even on the USB
attached hard drives on the several Raspberry Pis which we use here.
--
73,
Ged.
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