Backup Central

I attempted to restore a set of files to a directory and was told:

Fatal Error: Previous backup to /mnt/e3 seems to have failed.
Rerun rdiff-backup rdiff-with --check-destination-dir option to revert directory to state before unsuccessful session.

I fail to understand the instruction, find no such option described in the manual, and when I run the above command in the rdiff-backup-data directory, get python errors:

# rdiff-backup rdiff-with --check-destination-dir
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/rdiff-backup", line 23, in ?
rdiff_backup.Main.Main(sys.argv[1:])
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/rdiff_backup/Main.py", line 280, in Main
final_set_action(rps)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/rdiff_backup/Main.py", line 213, in final_set_action
if restore_set_root(rps[0]): action = "restore"
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/rdiff_backup/Main.py", line 655, in restore_set_root
assert (from_datadir[1] == "increments" or
AssertionError: ('rdiff-backup-data', 'rdiff-with')

On Fri, 19 Aug 2005, JonathanSmith wrote:

I attempted to restore a set of files to a directory and was told:

Fatal Error: Previous backup to /mnt/e3 seems to have failed.
Rerun rdiff-backup rdiff-with --check-destination-dir option to revert
directory to state before unsuccessful session.

I fail to understand the instruction, find no such option described in the
manual, and when I run the above command in the rdiff-backup-data directory,
get python errors:

# rdiff-backup rdiff-with --check-destination-dir

rdiff-backup --check-destination-dir /path/to/mirror

the /path/to/mirror should be the same as you used when you were doing the
backup... (i.e. without the trailing /rdiff-backup-data)

-dean

O.K., dean, I followed your advice, which seemed to work. The command
took about eight hours to process and ended with no message.
So, is that a good thing, bad thing, or too soon to tell?

After the backup failed I ran zcat -t *.gz without any reported problems. Then I again ran rdiff-backup --check-destination-dir <target directory>. There was a series of error reports with warnings about a file not found followed by

" A regular file was indicated by the metadata, but could not be
constructed from existing increments because last increment had type None. Instead of the actual file's data, an empty length file will be created. This error is probably caused by data loss in the
rdiff-backup destination directory, or a bug in rdiff-backup "


After a long time the run concluded with:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/rdiff-backup", line 23, in ?
rdiff_backup.Main.Main(sys.argv[1:])
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/rdiff_backup/Main.py", line 282, in Main
take_action(rps)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/rdiff_backup/Main.py", line 254, in take_action
elif action == "check-destination-dir": CheckDest(rps[0])
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/rdiff_backup/Main.py", line 839, in CheckDest
dest_rp.conn.regress.Regress(dest_rp)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/rdiff_backup/regress.py", line 74, in Regress
former_current_mirror_rp.delete()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/rdiff_backup/rpath.py", line 869, in delete
else: self.conn.os.unlink(self.path)
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/mnt/e3/rdiff-backup-data/current_mirror.2005-08-19T20:26:39-04:00.data'

I guess I should have removed the older mirror first, eh?