Re: Can I interrupt an rdiff-backup backup?

[Mike Hart]

Hi Robert

Many thanks for the reply.  Your answer explains why there's no activity 
on the local drive but steady activity on the remote drive (as well as 
what rdiff-backup is doing, of course).

I'm going to delete the lot and start again, but I have a problem 
deleting the rdiff-backup-data directory

below is what happens.  I'd be grateful for any solutions.  This is 
Ubuntu 22.04 in case it's not obvious.

mike@TV-PC:/media/primary/backups/Mike-PC/Projects$ rm -rfv 
rdiff-backup-data
removed 'rdiff-backup-data/.fuse_hidden0014522e000000c4'
removed 'rdiff-backup-data/.fuse_hidden0014522f000000c1'
removed 'rdiff-backup-data/.fuse_hidden00145a71000000c2'
removed 'rdiff-backup-data/.fuse_hidden00145fa2000000c3'
rm: cannot remove 'rdiff-backup-data': Directory not empty
mike@TV-PC:/media/primary/backups/Mike-PC/Projects$ ls rdiff-backup-data
mike@TV-PC:/media/primary/backups/Mike-PC/Projects$ ls -la rdiff-backup-data
total 804
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root   4096 Jan 21 12:47 .
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root    464 Jan 21 04:40 ..
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root      0 Jan 21 04:00 .fuse_hidden0014522e000000c5
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 220862 Jan 21 07:11 .fuse_hidden0014522f000000c6
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 572052 Jan 21 08:31 .fuse_hidden00145a71000000c7
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root  23842 Jan 21 04:13 .fuse_hidden00145fa2000000c8

On 21/01/2023 15:18, Robert Nichols wrote:
> On 1/21/23 5:29 AM, Mike Hart wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I've just started using rdiff-backup (rd-b), which I think is a great 
> > program.  I started an initial backup that I expected to take about 3 
> > days, but during the night my computer decided to reboot or at least 
> > close down the window running rd-b (amongst others).
> >
> > I have re-started rd-b but as far as I can see there is no disk 
> > activity at all on the local disk. There does appear to be some 
> > activity on the Server (remote disk) which makes me think that rd-b 
> > is caught in an infinite loop of some sort.
>
> The server is undoing the failed backup. This is a very lengthy 
> operation. Since this is your initial backup, it will be faster to log 
> into the server and simply delete the entire archive for this computer.
>
> Unless this "3 days" is just due to a a slow network, this has the 
> potential to be a big problem in the future. If a subsequent 
> incremental backup should fail, the server could take that much time 
> or more to regress the archive to the last successful backup.