Re: [rdiff-backup-users] strange read-only file error

[Alex Pounds]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 07:27:28AM -0400, Eric Beversluis wrote:
> I'm getting this huge set of error messages, most of which I don't
> understand. There's a "read-only file system" line which seems to be
> intelligible but I have no idea why it appears. 

I hope I'm not teaching you to suck eggs, but filesystems are often
remounted read-only automatically if the OS encounters errors while
writing. It sounds like that happened to your drive mid-backup, and that's
why rebooting fixed it – it got mounted as normal as part of the boot
process.

It sounds like your backup drive is becoming more unreliable (which is a
less dramatic way of saying "could be about to fail"), which is why it
happened at different points in your backup. USB also has limits to the
amount of data it can simultaneously transfer, so if you're doing a lot of
other USB-centric stuff at the same time as your backup this could also be
a problem. 

If you have a second system you can plug your external drive into, you
could do some tests to confirm it is the drive that's causing problems. 


Hope this helps, 

-- 
Alex Pounds                             .~.     http://www.alexpounds.com/
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