Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Various rdiff-backup problems

[Daniel.Li]

Well, it seems that you have met compatible issues.

Anyway, I would like to ask, how about network performance and how many
resources it will take, like memory/cpu etc.

I'm new to rdiff-backup. Hope to hear some experience here. Thanks in
advance.


On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 15:04 +0200, David wrote:
> Hi there.
> 
> I've been using rdiff-backup for a long time, but now seem to have a
> problem with it (shortly after upgrading our backup server from Debian
> Etch to Debian Lenny).
> 
> When the server that's being backed up has a large number of files (in
> the millions), rdiff-backup now takes a very long time (I've left it
> for 24 hours, and it was still busy), and uses up a huge amount of ram
> and CPU.
> 
> I've tried turning rdiff-backup's verbosity to maximum, and there is
> no indication of what could be causing the massive resource
> usage/delay. The last log entry is something about removing some
> metadata file. Nothing about scanning the harddrive, or compressing or
> anything like that. Also, fwiw, the server's changed very little
> between the first rdiff-backup backup and the second.
> 
> (I'm using rdiff-backup 1.2.8 on the server).
> 
> This is causing problems, because earlier backups never complete, so
> the later backups never get a chance to run. At the moment I'm busy
> updating some of the backups so they use a hardlink snapshot-like
> method for storing history, instead of rdiff-backup. The disk usage
> will be greater, but at least it should work better...
> 
> Another problem I've noticed is that rdiff-backup isn't very good with
> backwards compatibility, eg:
> 
> 1) If two different versions of rdiff-backup communicate over the
> network, they will often fail. This makes it very hard to use
> rdiff-backup for over-the-network backups, unless you can ensure the
> same version is running on both sides. Instead, I use rsync for
> over-network transfers (it's very good with network reverse
> compatibility), and only ever use rdiff-backup locally to store
> increments.
> 
> 2) Newer versions of rdiff-backup have problems reading the
> rdiff-backup store of older rdiff-backup versions. After upgrading our
> backup server, I had to delete the rdiff-backup data store for many of
> the backups, losing months or years worth of history (not so
> important, really, but I dlike to keep them around until disk space
> runs low on the backup server), because I couldn't get rdiff-backup
> working (it kept on getting assertion errors with the number of
> "current"-<something> files being incorrect), and Google searches & my
> experimentation couldn't solve the problem.
> 
> I just thought I'd mention those problems.
> 
> David.
> 
> 
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-- 
Daniel.Li <address@hidden>
PALFocus (http://palfocus.oicp.net)