Re: not excluding socket dir?

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Joe Steele <address@hidden> writes:

> Derek:
>
> After running your backup with the exclusion, have you looked in
> /mnt/backup/backups/mail/var/lib/imap/ to see if the socket directory
> was, in fact, excluded?  My guess is that it is not there.

Yes, and it is not there..

> My guess is that you first made a backup without the '--exclude
> /mnt/snap/var/lib/imap/socket' exclusion, and then you added the
> exclusion later.  I'm also assuming that you are using v1.2.8.  (Newer
> v2.0 should not have the problem.)

Actually, I think this is probably what happened; I backed up, saw the
error, and then realized I didn't need to backup the socket dir so added
the exclusion, but then I got the error again and sent the email to this
list (not realizing I would get the error that one extra time but no
further).

And yes, this is 1.2.8.  ALL my systems are on 1.2.8.

> The first backup of a socket can succeed without error whereas
> subsequent backups can generate the warning whenever the socket is
> either changed or removed (or in your case, excluded).  Details for
> why this can occur are given in a bug report of mine from 2009:
>
> https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=26847

Interesting.

> My guess is that the warning will only appear the first time after you
> have added the exclusion.  After that, the warning should no longer
> appear for the excluded socket.  But if you wish, you can apply the
> patch contained in the bug report to prevent the problem in the
> future.

The warning occurred on the first (or maybe second) backup; only once I
saw the error did I realize it was backing up a socket dir so I excluded
it.

Regardless, it's not backing up the socket dir now, and I'm not getting
the error anymore.  So all is good.

> As Eric noted, there is no real value in backing up sockets.  In fact,
> the tar command never backs up sockets.
>
> --Joe

Indeed -- I had no intension to back it up, but it's not like I went
through the whole file system to find socket subdirs.  One would expect
those to be in /run, not /var/lib ;)

Thanks!

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       address@hidden             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant