[Box Backup] Suggested change in behaviour
Ben Summers
boxbackup@fluffy.co.uk
Mon, 20 Sep 2004 14:39:10 +0100
Imagine this scenario. You have a single partition on a hard drive,
mounted as /home. This drive fails, the server reboots, but fails to
pass fsck checks as much is unreadable. You modify /etc/fstab so it
isn't mounted, and reboot. The machine comes up.
Unfortunately, you forgot to disable bbackupd running on boot, which
you've got running in lazy mode. It runs, does it's initial scan, and
marks everything in this partition as deleted.
This is unlikely to help the situation much, and incidentally, has just
happened to me. (Fortunately, I have "undelete" technology hidden in
the server, and have just written a bit of code to allow access to it
via bbackupquery, so it's not a calamity - even if it has also
undeleted files which were deleted by the users before the partition
vanished.)
I propose a slight change in behaviour which may go some way towards
resolving this problem, but I wonder if it will cause any other issues.
* If bbackupd finds that the root of a Location (as specified in
bbackupd.conf) contains no files or directories, it
- will log a message "Backup location /x is empty, not changing
store" at level LOG_ERR
- will not modify the relevant location on the server
Can anyone see any situation where this might cause problems? This will
only be triggered if there's absolutely nothing to back up in a
location.
Thanks,
Ben