[rdiff-backup-users] Resuming rdiff-backup after crash

[Trevor Harmon]

One of the dirty little secrets of the Linux world is that crashes are 
not uncommon. Although the kernel rarely crashes, XFree86 can and does 
crash, and this is almost as bad, since it brings down every GUI 
application along with it.

I had this experience today when I had started rdiff-backup in an xterm 
and was browsing the web with Mozilla. Apparently the browser made a bad 
function call and the X display crashed, which crashed the xterm, which 
crashed rdiff-backup. When I got an xterm back and restarted 
rdiff-backup (with the exact same parameters), I saw this message:

"Last backup dated Sun May  4 13:08:14 2003 was aborted, but we aren't 
resuming it."

What does this mean? Is rdiff-backup trying to resume the backup 
cleanly? That would be great if it is, but then again, if you do Ctrl-C, 
you get a nasty-looking Python stacktrace, so I really don't know how 
rdiff-backup is designed to handle crashes. (I'm using 0.10.2.)

It would really be cool if rdiff-backup were fault-tolerant and could 
pick up a backup job no matter when it dies. That would also allow a 
pause-resume feature, which I don't think exists now. (e.g. pressing 
Ctrl-C halts the current backup, then doing, say, "rdiff-backup 
--resume" picks up where it left off.) Not exactly a high-priority 
feature, but something that would be nice to have.

Trevor