Re: cross-platform backup tool openSUSE Leap 15.4: version problem?

[Frank Crawford]

Lew,

Yes that is correct, you cannot directly mix rdiff-backup 1.2 and
rdiff-backup 2, for a number of reasons, mostly to do with issues with
Python 2 vs Python 3 and their networking.

However, this is also a fairly common issue, and really only affects
your rdiff-backup server (i.e. where the backups are stored), as the
clients only need a single version installed.

The current best practice is to have both versions installed on the
server, and some method of selecting which one the client needs.  The
issue is usually a packaging problem, as various ancillary files, like
man pages, or even the actual program, clash (i.e. both versions of
rdiff-backup).  For most common distribution a renamed and stripped
down version (i.e. leaving off documentation, etc) has been made
available, although I don't know if one was done for openSUSE.

If you want more details about this, you can find it here:
https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup/blob/master/docs/migration.adoc

I should add that rdiff-backup 2.0.5 has no issues reading older backup
repositories, the issues are all around the network transport.

Regards
Frank

On Tue, 2022-07-05 at 20:55 -0700, Lew Wolfgang wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> Longtime rdiff-backup user here.
> 
> I've got a couple dozen desktops and servers backing up
> to a central server, all running openSUSE Leap 15.3.  Last
> week I updated one of the desktops to 15.4 and now I'm
> getting rdiff-backup errors.
> 
> I vaguely recall that version 2 broke backward compatibility.
> Is that true?
> 
> Leap 15.3 has 1.2.8
> Leap 15.4 has 2.0.5
> 
> If this is the issue, is there a workaround?  I've got almost a
> petabyte
> of data floating around on these hosts and I can't instantly upgrade
> all of them in unison.
> 
> The installs are all from the standard openSUSE repos. Maybe try to
> install 1.2.8 on the newer Leap 15.4 system?
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
> Regards,
> Lew
> 
>