Hi all,
I recently decided to choose rdiff-backup as backup tool on 2 Linux
machines.
One is running it perfectly.
But the other one has a strange behavior when running rdiff-backup.
Actually, it find differences in a lot of files while there isn't any.
This leads to rdiff-backup overwriting a lot of files for nothing and
taking a long time.
Let me take an example to clarify things.
Consider I already have 2 backups done on a daily basis (let me call them
A and B chronologically -- thus B is the current mirror).
I run 'rdiff-backup --compare' just before backing up : it returns "no
changes"
I run the back up and here rdiff-backup finds thousand of files that have
changed (viewed from session statistics) !!!
This backup is called C and is the new mirror.
When I look at the file statistics, a lot of files are marked as changed.
The first weird thing here is that IncrementSize is not null while
SourceSize and MirrorSize are identical (IncrementSize is always a small
number - <128 -).
For example : home/USER/.kde/share/config/katerc 1 67 67 66
Ouch!
Second weird thing is that absolutely no diff between C and B is stored
nor in the data itself, nor in the metadata
Now looking at the source files : their access times (and only these ones)
have been updated at the time of the backup (thus rdiff-backup does
something that changes this).
Looking at the destination files : their access and change times have been
updated also but not the modify time.
Last very weird thing : if I run a rdiff-backup --compare-at-time 1B (thus
comparing current files with old B backup), it returns "no changes" ...
!!!
At now my thinking is that rdiff-backup views a difference while there
isn't when running in the backing up context but clearly see that there
isn't in the comparing context.
I also runned a rdiff-backup --compare every 5 minutes with a cronjob and
it always return "no changes" except at the time where the backup started.
Thus it seems that riff-backup is itself fooling itself... But not sure
because if I run things manually (instead of cronjob), everything works
fine.
I don't know why I'm having this behavior at now but for sure I'd like to
prevent it to appear. ;-)
Did anyone already have this behavior ? And eventually found the cause and
fix that ?
As information, below the characteristics of the system (and between
parenthesis the ones of the other machine when everything works well as
comparison).
- rdiff-backup version : 1.2.8 (1.2.8)
- OS : Kubuntu 11.04 (Debian Wheezy)
- kernel : 2.6.38 (3.2.0)
- launching way : cronjob (cronjob)
- source FS : ext4 (ext3)
- destination FS : ext4 (ext4)
So basically only noticeable difference is a quite old kernel on the
screwing up machine.
I will increase verbosity of rdiff-backup and keep you updated.
In between, thanks in advance for any help and support. Feel free to ask
if missing information can help.
Best regards,
Matthieu
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