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

[Charles Duffy]

Xavier Bertou wrote:
> 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.

I have a system of cron jobs and wrapper scripts surrounding my
rdiff-backup installation which kills dead processes, reports on which
backups succeeded and failed, ensures sure that --check-destination-dirs
is run on any folder that needs it before any new backup is started, and
disallows multiple connections attempting to backup from or restore to
the same host at once.

rdiff-backup is indeed not quite as robust as it could be
out-of-the-box, and it does indeed seem to trigger some issues in ext3,
but with appropriate surrounding infrastructure it WORKSFORME.