Thanks for the help. Found them all in one backup as you predicted. Deleted
the backup and they are gone

On Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 11:07 G.W. Haywood <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> On Sat, 18 Jul 2026, Ron Colcernian wrote:
> >
> > Would someone kindly point me to the remedy for the following message?
> >
> > What document should I read to guide me to resolution of this issue?
> >
> > I have 1157 of these messages.
> >
> > 2026-07-16 01:24:05  admin : BackupPC_refCountUpdate: missing pool
> > file 2f168f994f2744a2c4c9046b821ebcc1 count 1
> >
> > I don't know how long this has been happening, sadly.
> >
> > Cpool is V4 (90% of it was converted from V3, 10% is newly created V4
> > daily backups)
> > Running backuppc, version 4.4.0
> > Ubuntu 24.04 Instance on a Proxmo install.
>
> Going through this a bit quickly because of time pressures, I'm sorry
> if there are things like typos and repetition which I've seen in some
> of my recent posts. :(  Also I've generalized it a little - I tend to
> do that in case it helps other people later on; I guess you have just
> one missing pool file?
>
> CAUSES:
>
> Unfortunately there seem to be several causes for missing pool files.
> They are mentioned in mailng list threads listed below - the mailing
> list archive is a valuable resource.  I prefer to download the entire
> archive and use 'grep' to search it.
>
> Here are the causes that I know of, descending order of probability:
>
> 1. When either the BackupPC server or one of its clients is shut down
> improperly while a backup is active.
>
> 2. Problems when migrating from a V3 pool to a V4 pool.  Possibly the
> system 'ulimit' may have been too small, but the migration utility has
> not been tested well.  In view of the numbers of installations and how
> often the utility is used, it probably never will be.  My experience
> with it was unsatisfactory but that was around ten years ago.  In the
> end for that installation I started from scratch with a fresh V4 taken
> from source (the copy which gave trouble was from a Debian package).
>
> 3. Some older versions of BackupPC 4.x contained faults that sometimes
> caused missing pool files.  At least to the extent that they are known
> those faults have been fixed.  Obviously upgrade faulty versions, but
> version 4.4.0 should be fine.  There are discussions in Github issues
> as well as on the mailing list.
>
> FIXES:
>
> Fortunately, missing pool files isn't a show-stopper.  If you come
> across missing pool file messages:
>
> If they're artifacts of the V3->V4 conversion, then you can probably
> just ignore them.  The messages will eventually stop when the backups
> that reference them expire.  If you delete those backups manually the
> same thing will happen (but you don't know which they are, read on).
>
> You can just tell BackupPC to back up the files which are missing from
> the pool.  It isn't straightforward to get from a pool file hash to
> the original file but there are useful pointers in the mail archives.
> Below [*] are some threads from the mailing list with more info.  Some
> are a little old, but no less useful for that.  Some refer to scripts
> that you might find useful.  I see there's a promise of another script
> in the not too distant future from Matthias@gmx... (and I'd be pleased
> to see it Matthias, whatever state it's in. :)
>
> If you're using rsync/d for Xfer it might be worth tweaking the rsync
> options so that the destination files are compared bytewise instead of
> relying on the comparison of the metadata (timestamps and file sizes).
> I haven't tried this, and don't know for sure that it will help - I'm
> going on the comment in the config.pl file.  The tweak I'm thinking of
> is --ignore-times in place of --checksum in $Conf{RsyncFullArgsExtra}.
> You could instead add this to $Conf{RsyncArgsExtra} so that it would
> affect incremental backups as well as fulls, but that might not help
> much because the file missing from the pool probably isn't changing on
> the client (or it would have been backed up by now anyway) so it won't
> be compared until the next full backup happens.
>
> You might well find that all the missing pool files relate to a single
> client.  In that case you might just rename the client directory in
> /var/lib/Backuppc/pc/[**] to some random string which doesn't resemble
> one of your host names.  BackupPC will start backups from scratch for
> that client.  I do that a lot in testing.  When you're happy that your
> backups are OK, just delete the renamed directory tree.
>
> HTH
>
> [*]
> https://sourceforge.net/p/backuppc/mailman/message/35708181/
> https://sourceforge.net/p/backuppc/mailman/message/37269343/
> https://sourceforge.net/p/backuppc/mailman/message/58833484/
> https://sourceforge.net/p/backuppc/mailman/message/59127801/
> https://sourceforge.net/p/backuppc/mailman/message/59221642/
>
> [**]
> Or wherever your /pc/ and /pool/ directories happen to live.
>
> --
>
> 73,
> Ged.
>
>
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