[Box Backup] housekeeping issues

[Ben Summers]

On 20 Dec 2005, at 00:03, Alex Howansky wrote:

>
>>> 2) The account I really care about is #8. I need it to be backed  
>>> up ASAP, but
>>> I'm stuck on #4. Can I temporarily manually edit the accounts.txt  
>>> file so that
>>> it contains only the account #8, then restart bbstored so that it  
>>> housekeeps
>>> just that one account? Will doing so screw up any of the other  
>>> accounts
>>> (assuming I restore the file to its previous contents once the  
>>> backup is
>>> complete.)
>>
>> I'm fairly sure you're safe on this option.
>
> Ok, the housekeeping on account #4 finished after about 45 minutes.  
> It took
> about an hour to housekeep all accounts. (As a result, I've set my
> TimeBetweenHousekeeping setting to two hours.) I then started  
> bbackupd on the
> client for account #8 (my database server), and it promptly backed  
> up one dump
> file, then stopped because the next dump file would have kicked it  
> over the
> limit. Sigh. So I had to run housekeeping again, then backup again,  
> then
> housekeeping again, then backup again -- until I got all five days  
> worth of
> dumps backed up. So, I'm back to normal now, phew.

Glad it all worked out in the end.

In general, you should only have to worry if housekeeping takes  
longer than the connect period on the client. It only interrupts  
housekeeping if the connection is for the currently processed account.

>
> A forced purge / account cleanup (whatever you want to call it)  
> feature would
> be nice -- I know I'm not the first to request it. Yes, I could  
> have set the
> soft limit to an artificially low value and then run housekeeping,  
> but manually
> running through those gyrations just to overcome the lack of such a  
> feature
> seems silly to me. I think I know better than BoxBackup which data  
> of mine is
> ok to keep or not -- I should be able to override its standard  
> behavior without
> jumping through hoops.

I agree. Once we've got the new version released, I would like to  
design a new storage system which doesn't require scanning of the  
account. I'm thinking of a nice reference counted scheme.

Ben