Hi Eric,
I'm disturbed by the fact that the path contains a blank, but your commands don't show any quoting or escaping. Is it really the whole command?
Fish has an auto-completion that, of course, escapes the spaces in file and directory names. Properly, the command is for d in (cat /media/david/Backup\ 1\ TB/backupdirs) sudo rdiff-backup backup $d /media/david/Backup\ 1\ TB/$d end
What does `cat "/media/david/Backup Drive/backupdirs"` actually show? Could it be that it contains .purple multiple times?
cat /media..... shows this: david@ASUS ~> cat /media/david/Backup\ 1\ TB/backupdirs Desktop Documents Games Music Pictures/Zeichnen_und_Malen Pictures/Memes .purple .mozilla snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox/onotah21.default-1528902033143 snap/firefox/common/.cache/mozilla/firefox/onotah21.default-1528902033143 Templates .thunderbird Videos I checked the backupdirs file with a hex editor, and there are no non-printable characters. ".purple" is preceded with 0A (end of line), the . is 2E, and ".purple" is immediately followed by another 0A. Using "sleep 2" for d in (cat /media/david/Backup\ 1\ TB/backupdirs) sudo rdiff-backup backup $d /media/david/Backup\ 1\ TB/$d sleep 2 end results in this, again: NOTE: Starting increment operation from source path .purple to destination path /media/david/Backup 1 TB/.purple ERROR: Either there is more than one current_mirror or the last backup is not in the past. Aborting. ERROR: Action backup failed on step run So super-disturbing that david@ASUS ~> sudo rdiff-backup backup .purple /media/david/Backup\ 1\ TB/.purple [sudo] password for david: NOTE: Starting increment operation from source path .purple to destination path /media/david/Backup 1 TB/.purple always works. The file system is btrfs (on both source and destination). Checking the destination filesystem with gparted doesn't give me any error. Deleting the rdiff-backup-data folder doesn't help. Deleting the entire contents of .purple on the destination side and then, running the for loop, also results in an error. Perhaps the most disturbing discovery: Running rdiff-backup inside this forloop, with an *empty* .purple directory on the source side, and a non-existent .purple directory on the destination side, also results in an error. What the funk... David
