Re: Doubled dates in old repositories

[Dominic Raferd]

On Mon, 20 Apr 2020 at 06:46, Eric L. Zolf <address@hidden> wrote:

> we've got a report for an issue [322] where we're not sure how it
> happened and if it happens often. As I know that some of you have many
> and long standing repos, you might want to have a look before you
> upgrade to 2.0.0. Also I'd like to know if the problem is unique (manual
> intervention could have caused the issue) or generalized.
>
> Basically, there are two entries with exactly the same date and time in
> the repository, this shouldn't be and this makes rdiff-backup 2.0.0
> choke on it (rdiff-backup 1.2/1.3 -actually Python 2- doesn't choke but
> its reaction is unpredictable, which isn't really better).
>
> How to detect (under Linux): run `cd MY_BACKUP_REPO; ls -1
> rdiff-backup-data/mirror_metadata.* | sed -e 's/^.*mirror_metadata\.//'
> -e 's/\.[a-z]*.gz$//' | uniq -cd` -> if the output is NOT empty, you
> have the issue.
>
> How to fix: delete with 1.2/1.3 the older entries in your repo(s) up and
> including to the dates given by the previous command.
>
> As said, small feedback to understand the extension of the issue would
> be great. I'll work around the issue to make rdiff-backup 2 more robust
> in this regard.
>

I have checked our 108 repositories which go back a long way (I am still
using v1.2.8). I find this issue in one repository for some 27 dates
(mostly but not all consecutive) in January and February 2009. They are
almost (but not quite) the oldest entries in this repo. How do you
recommend I delete - using --remove-older-than? By the way, verification of
all our repositories fails earlier than 2013 but I have left the earlier
data in place because it might still be somewhat recoverable - I am
wondering if I should remove it all before upgrading to v2.

Thanks for all your (and others') great work on updating rdiff-backup.

Dominic