[Box Backup] Interrupting backups in progress

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Matt,

On Thu, 18 Oct 2007, Matt Brown wrote:

>> > -- Chris I might try altering the code for the backup-client to call 
>> > boxreport.pl if it finds ReportScript = /usr/local/bin/boxreport.pl (or 
>> > similar) in bbackupd.conf (if I can work out how to do it :-) that way I 
>> > can get the the report to generate and mail right after the backup has 
>> > completed rather than having to wait for cron etc.
>> 
>> There should be no need for that, now that we have backup-start and 
>> backup-finish hooks for NotifyScript. When NotifyScript is called for 
>> backup-start, it could record the current time. When called for 
>> backup-finish, it could generate a report from the backup-start time to the 
>> current time.
>
> Following on from this, is it possible to send an interrupt signal to 
> bbackupd ? i.e something like bbackupctl -q stop  or bbackupctl -q interrupt 
> ?

You can send a "reload" command with bbackupctl, that should stop any 
backup currently in progress.

> The reasoning behind it is we only allow clients to backup between a 
> certain window each day, more for there benefit so it does not saturate 
> their line and cause us to get "My internet connection is really slow 
> etc" type calls. At the mo I simply run a cron at two certain times a 
> day, and issue a boxbackup-client stop which in turn just kills the 
> process and isnt very clean.... its not very often a backup takes a huge 
> amount of time, until someone decides to offload their entire collection 
> of MP3, Docs, Pron etc somewhere on the mount point :-)

But it's much better to be able to sync during the day without disruption. 
Perhaps a router with QoS support might help? Or perhaps we could add rate 
limiting and schedules to bbackupd?

Currently, reload and terminate will not update the StoreObjectInfoFile, 
so regularly using them will significantly reduce the network efficiency 
of Box. I'm not sure that it's actually necessary to terminate uncleanly 
rather than cleanly in this case. Any thoughts, anyone?

> Then NotifySysAdmin could get a handle like backup-stopped or 
> backup-interrupted ?  The report can then take this action into account 
> and also means we can keep the daemon running without having to keep 
> starting and stopping each day.

At the moment it will get backup-stopped, we could add an interrupt 
command and a backup-interrupted message.

Cheers, Chris.
-- 
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