[Box Backup] exception BackupStore BadDirectoryFormat

[Ben Summers]

On 15 Apr 2004, at 00:57, Imran wrote:

> On Wed, 14 Apr 2004 16:12:33 +0100, Ben Summers wrote
>>> No, I didn't clean anything.
>>
>> OK, then what you should do, at the very minimum, is
>>
>> ....
>>
>> * Don't randomly delete files again.
>
> I think I may have been not clear.

Sorry. I must have got confused.

>  The directory error happened on its own.
> I mean, i installed the accounts, and started up 4 clients.  checked 
> on the
> server a day later, and everything looked like it had been backed up.  
> That
> was when I noticed the errors (once per each time the backup cycle 
> happens).
> Server and client were running.  I was able to query and do ls of the 
> stuff.
> even tried to restore a random directory and that worked.

I have a vague suspicion about what might have happened. Which platform 
are you running on, and which version of Box Backup were you using?

Could you have been accidently running two bbackupds on one machine at 
the same time?


>
> So it wasn't that I was doing anything weird to it.  Anyway, after I 
> did the
> tests, that was when I ran into a different problem.  which was that I 
> let the
> bbackupquery timeout, etc.  But it turns out thats not why the client 
> froze
> up.  It was because I was doing a 'strace -p' on the bbackupd process, 
> and
> that seemed to have frozen the process after I did a ctrl-c to get out 
> of
> strace. It doesn't do that always.  Only sometimes.  I was doing an 
> strace
> again to figure out what dir the bbackupd was trying to read when it 
> got the
> error.  but I accidentally triggered the hanging.  to unhang it, i 
> simply ran
> the strace again, which gave me some terminate type of error and 
> kicked out of
> the strace.  and then I noticed that the bbackupd started to write 
> stuff to
> the logs.  I ran strace again, ctrl-c, ran strace again, etc., for 3 
> or 4 more
> times.  didn't notice that freezing again.  I'm not an expert with 
> strace so
> maybe strace allows you to pass signals or keyboard events (or atleast 
> ctrl-c
> or pause or something) to the process its viewing?  Anyway, maybe it 
> was
> because i closed strace when the bbackupd gave the error and maybe was 
> waiting
> for something.   (because it was around 3 to 10 seconds after I 
> received the
> BadDirectoryFormat, that I pressed ctrl-c in strace...both times that I
> produced that error.  I'll try again, but for now I'm going to clean 
> out that
> account and try the backup again.

That shouldn't be related. Clients should be able to do just about 
anything, and the server should be unaffected. The code is written to 
be basically transactional, and to recover cleanly where it's not 
completely transactional.

Ben