Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Backup fails with "lost connection to the remote"

[Dominic Raferd]

On 23 March 2017 at 07:55, Henti Smith <address@hidden> wrote:

> Good day all.
>
> I'm having a tough problem with backing up a server. We've been running
> successful backups on the server, but due to storage constraints we dropped
> the retention to just one day. We're using backupninja to manage the
> backups for us, but the underlying backup tool is rdiff-backup.
>
> Since then we've been having regression and timeout issues, and have not
> been able to successfully backup the data (which is quiet large)
>
> I've even tried deleting the destination location completely and starting
> from scratch.
>
> The backup command is :
>
> /usr/bin/rdiff-backup  --force --remote-schema \
> 'ssh -C -p 22 %s rdiff-backup --server' --print-statistics \
> --exclude '/home/*/.gnupg' \
> --exclude '/var/cache/backupninja/duplicity' \
> --include '/var/backups' \
> --include '/usr/local/bin' \
> --include '/usr/local/sbin' \
> --include '/var/lib/dpkg/status' \
> --include '/var/lib/dpkg/status-old' \
> --include '/var/lib/jenkins' \
> --exclude '/*' / \
> address@hidden::/srv/backups/
> jenkins-master-01.internal.company.com/
>
> The error we get is, Multiple lines of "UpdateError ${path_to_file} Updated
> mirror temp file ${path_to_another_file} does not match source" ending
> with:
> Killed
>
>                                       Fatal Error: Lost connection to the
> remote system
>

​You could try setting on the client (i.e. connection initiator) in
~/.ssh/config:
ServerAliveInterval 5

and on the server (i.e. responder) in ​/etc/ssh/sshd_config:
ClientAliveInterval 5

This is more likely to help if you are backing up over an external
connection.


>
> I'm really at a loss as to what is causing the problem. It's likely that
> the files listed in the "does not match source" are changing during backup
> as our Jenkins server is pretty busy. If this is the cause, how do I get
> around that ?


​If your Jenkins server's fs is on top of LVM, you can create an LVM
snapshot and then backup from that. Btrfs and zfs, for instance, offer
snapshot capabilities too - so does Windows NTFS. Ext[234] filesystems have
no built-in snapshot capability - you have to put them on an LVM logical
volume. Before you take the snapshot you need to ensure that the data you
are snapping is in a consistent state, of course.

Dominic
http://www.timedicer.co.uk