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

[Xavier Bertou]

I must agree with what Frederik said. rdiff-backup works just fine
when rsync works just fine, ie when you don't need a backup except for
stupid user deletion of files. When real bad things happen,
rdiff-backup doesn't handle any errors. File I/O error? The whole
backup fails, and I get zillions of errors on checking the
incrementals. I had at some time a very bad filesystem issue which
scared the kernel whenever I was trying to access a file, Linux just
killing the process. Of course this never had happened to me in the
last 10 years of Unix administration, but it happened a few months
ago, and again, no backup for a few days until I figured it out, and
no way to recover the incrementals.
Running rdiff-backup and having it fail because of an I/O error is
just not acceptable for a backup system. Of course, as long as
everything works fine, no problem. But for real life situations, the
ones you really need a backup, the total absence of error management
in rdiff-backup is a killer.
rdiff-backup is very nice and user friendly, has many features, but it
should really be more fault tolerant.
Cheers,
--
Xavier

On 6/26/07, Charles Duffy <address@hidden> wrote:
> Frederik wrote:
> > Yes, it's normal that it fails in these cases. But it's not normal
> > that it is not able to recover from it without removing all
> > increments. For example, in case of corruption, it should ignore all
> > corrupted files, but it should not completely prevent creating new
> > backups or prevent restoring correct backups. Now it seems all
> > rdiff-backup operations are completely blocked until you manually
> > remove all increments, even of files which are not corrupted. This is
> > unacceptable for me. I had never such experiences with Bacula.
> >
> And I've never had such experiences with rdiff-backup -- and I have a
> very large number of servers using it on a nightly basis, and my backup
> server has run out of space (or had filesystem corruption) more than
> once. Are you sure that you're using it correctly?
>
> Does --check-destination-dir remove increments on you, or do you get
> some kind of error even after using --check-destination-dir?
>
>
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