Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Robustness to errors during backup

[Maarten Bezemer]

Hi,

On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, Frederik wrote:

> Like I said: my problem is not that my backup is corrupted, I know
> that this is not rdiff-backup's fault.

Just to get things into perspective:
If, by some external force, e.g. lightning strikes the building, your
backup tapes get de-magnetized... Would you expect the tape drive
manufacturer to provide means to automagically detect this and continue
working with a faulty tape, at the risk of screwing up your backup
strategy even further?

Oh yes, there's a lot of room for improvements to rdiff-backup. No
argument there. Human-parseable error messages is one of them. Adding
links to suggested solutions for 'well-known exceptions' is another
one. But trying to do "smart stuff" in case of an unexpected inconsistency
definitely is NOT what you want.
Take for example an uncleanly unmounted filesystem. During boot-time,
simple things like reference counts and unlinked files can be "fixed", but
unexpected inconsistencies require human intervention for a reason.


-- 
Maarten