[Jbackpack-discussion] Fwd: Jbackpack doesn't recognise my backup set

[Alistair Kirk]

Thanks for your quick reply Ed.  I've been doing some testing, and my current theory is that the Ubuntu version of rdiff-backup (which I used to create the backup set) is creating file names which are incompatible with Windows (which I'm using to try and access the backup-set via jBackpack and Samba); specifically, most of the files in the rdiff-backup-data directory have dates and times in them which contain colons, and these are unacceptable to windows, and hence to jbackpack running under windows.   (The windows version of rdiff-backup uses semicolons instead...)

At first, Samba was mangling the names in this folder completely to randomised DOS-style 8.3 filenames, so no surprise jbackpack couldn't recognise them as valid rdiff backup byproducts.  Having tweaked my smb.conf (added a line "mangled names = no"), they are now showing properly in Windows explorer, but Windows can't actually access the files, so now jbackpack is showing an error that 'the database is currently in use by another application' or something similar.

According to this page https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/samba/+bug/676304 this is a known bug in Samba; in other words as of Jan 2013 there's no straight 'solution', so I'm reduced to hacking around. Again. At the moment I'm presuming I have two options (not including ditching Windows, or throwing all my computers out the nearest window):

1. Tweak Samba somehow to represent colons in filenames as semicolons.  There is a 'mangle map = (foo bar)'  command in the smb.conf specification, but it seems it's been deprecated in recent versions of Samba, so I can't use that. Maybe there's another way?

2. Stop rdiff-backup from creating the colons.  There is a '--use-compatible-timestamps' switch according to the rdiff backup manual (http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup.1.html), which tells rdiff to create file names containing hyphens instead of colons;  however I'm not sure if this would be compatible with jBackpack?

I'll get back to you when I've made some more progress ...   By the way, you're of course right that jbackpack makes its own folder inside the rdiff-backup-data folder.  It gets created when you try to connect to the destination folder, meaning that jbackpack should in theory be perfectly compatible with rdiff backups not directly created using jbackpack.  Thus, my original question is answered, but my problem is not yet solved!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ed Bolson
Date: 20 January 2013 22:33
Subject: Re: [Jbackpack-discussion] Jbackpack doesn't recognise my backup set
To: "address@hidden" <address@hidden>


Jbackpack puts its own folder in the rdiff-backup folder. It essentially indexes the backup increments so that any of them can be listed and individual files restored. I've also decided to use scripted rdiff-backup for the backups, and use JBackup if necessary for restores.

Sent from my brilliant iPhone

On Jan 20, 2013, at 8:40 AM, Alistair Kirk <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi all, It would be great to have any help you can give me.  I would really love to get going with rdiff-backup and jbackpack - it seems like the ideal solution for me, but I'm having so many problems. I'm trying to organise backup of various laptops on my home network to my server, which is running Ubuntu.
>
> To keep things simple in the testing phase, I eliminated the network part of the workflow, and just tried using the Ubuntu box to create an rdiff-backup from one local directory to another.  I used the standard rdiff-backup command line to create the backup. ie. # rdiff-backup /source /destination.
>
> This ran through successfully; I then created updated the source directory with some new and modified data and successfully ran another rdiff-backup to make sure there was at least one increment in the backup set.  This all works fine, and when I run # rdiff-backup -l /destination I can see the new increment listed, and I can restore from the backup using # rdiff-backup /r now /destination/folder /restorelocation
>
> My server doesn't have a windowing environment installed, so I now want to use JBackPack running on one of my (Windows) network clients to browse the backups I've made using a friendly interface.  The source and destination directories are both shared out from the Ubuntu server over Samba and are readily accessible from the client machines.
>
> However when I access the Restore tab in jBackPack (having configured the destination directory in the Directories tab, I'm just getting the message that 'The selected directory is not yet a backup directory, but will be initialized as such'.
>
> My question is, how does jBackPack recognise an rdiff-backup location? How does a backup made with jbackpack look different from a standard rdiff-backup location, if at all?  How can I get JBackPack to access the backups I've made with rdiff-backup?
>
> I've been trying to find a backup configuration which works reliably for almost two weeks now - I must have tried perhaps fifteen different pieces of software in various combinations, and it's taking up far too much of my spare time. I'd love to have this working and would be very grateful for any suggestions.
>
> Many thanks in advance
>
> Al