Hi all, I recently decided to choose rdiff-backup as backup tool on 2 Linux machines.
One is running it perfectly. But the other one has a strange behavior when running rdiff-backup. Actually, it find differences in a lot of files while there isn't any. This leads to rdiff-backup overwriting a lot of files for nothing and taking a long time. Let me take an example to clarify things. Consider I already have 2 backups done on a daily basis (let me call them A and B chronologically -- thus B is the current mirror). I run 'rdiff-backup --compare' just before backing up : it returns "no changes" I run the back up and here rdiff-backup finds thousand of files that have changed (viewed from session statistics) !!! This backup is called C and is the new mirror. When I look at the file statistics, a lot of files are marked as changed. The first weird thing here is that IncrementSize is not null while SourceSize and MirrorSize are identical (IncrementSize is always a small number - <128 -). For example : home/USER/.kde/share/config/katerc 1 67 67 66 Ouch! Second weird thing is that absolutely no diff between C and B is stored nor in the data itself, nor in the metadata Now looking at the source files : their access times (and only these ones) have been updated at the time of the backup (thus rdiff-backup does something that changes this). Looking at the destination files : their access and change times have been updated also but not the modify time. Last very weird thing : if I run a rdiff-backup --compare-at-time 1B (thus comparing current files with old B backup), it returns "no changes" ... !!! At now my thinking is that rdiff-backup views a difference while there isn't when running in the backing up context but clearly see that there isn't in the comparing context. I also runned a rdiff-backup --compare every 5 minutes with a cronjob and it always return "no changes" except at the time where the backup started. Thus it seems that riff-backup is itself fooling itself... But not sure because if I run things manually (instead of cronjob), everything works fine. I don't know why I'm having this behavior at now but for sure I'd like to prevent it to appear. ;-) Did anyone already have this behavior ? And eventually found the cause and fix that ? As information, below the characteristics of the system (and between parenthesis the ones of the other machine when everything works well as comparison). - rdiff-backup version : 1.2.8 (1.2.8) - OS : Kubuntu 11.04 (Debian Wheezy) - kernel : 2.6.38 (3.2.0) - launching way : cronjob (cronjob) - source FS : ext4 (ext3) - destination FS : ext4 (ext4) So basically only noticeable difference is a quite old kernel on the screwing up machine. I will increase verbosity of rdiff-backup and keep you updated. In between, thanks in advance for any help and support. Feel free to ask if missing information can help. Best regards, Matthieu _______________________________________________ rdiff-backup-users mailing list at rdiff-backup-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/rdiff-backup-users Wiki URL: http://rdiff-backup.solutionsfirst.com.au/index.php/RdiffBackupWiki
