Re: [rdiff-backup-users] failing backup

[chuck odonnell]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 03:31:48PM -0400, Kurt Yoder wrote:
> Hello list
> 
> I am running rdiff-backup 1.1.5 on a Debian machine. Previously I  
> have been able to do restores without problems. However, now I am  
> having trouble restoring my boss's mail directory. It's his "in-box"  
> maildir directory (eg "./cur") with 2743 files in it, the largest  
> being 1.1 MB. Whenever I try to restore this file using -v9, I see  
> the preparation activity when rdiff-backup launches.
> 
> Then rdiff-backup does... *something* which is not displayed on the  
> terminal. The rdiff-backup process starts to use up progressively  
> more memory, until after several hours it is using gigabytes of  
> memory. At this point it segfaults and nothing in the maildir is  
> restored.
> 
> I did a bit of further digging with strace, and see an un-ending  
> stream of these kinds of messages:
> 
> lstat64("/backup/disk1/ns2_maildir/rdiff-backup-data/increments/ 
> richard-group.com/david/cur/ 
> 1170338212.M12781P21813V0000000000000801I03130440_0.db1,S=3073:2,S. 
> 2007-02-08T05:18:56-05:00.snapshot.gz", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0600,  
> st_size=1944, ...}) = 0
> lstat64("/backup/disk1/ns2_maildir/rdiff-backup-data/increments/ 
> richard-group.com/david/cur/ 
> 1170338212.M12781P21813V0000000000000801I03130440_0.db1,S=3073:2,S",  
> 0xbf983bb0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
> 
> Is it examining the directory to see what files exist in order to  
> calculate the restore? Is it taking such a long time and running out  
> of memory due to the number of files in the increments directory?  
> There are 108440 files in this directory.
> 
> I suppose I could do this restore manually with gnu find, etc.  
> However, if would be good if there's a way to get rdiff-backup to  
> work here.
> 
> Any comments or suggestions?
> 

one quick question -- is the destination directory a live Maildir? I
imagine this could wreak havoc if so.

chuck