[Dirvish] One of the vaults broken - init enough?

[Isaac W Traxler]

Presumably you had a working abckup at some point in the past and something went wrong. You now probably have numerous backup directories where a portion are still good but some number have littlle of no data.

The first goal is to get a good current backup. Before anythong elase, make sure no backups are running for home (as suggested by others). Now run a backup  init to get a good backup of home. If this fails, tell us ehat the log  files say. Once that works, tyour future backups should be fine.

This leaves the question of the exising backup directories. One approach would be to do nothing and simply let them eventually get purged out. A better approach would be to identify the failed backups and eliminate them (I go to the home directory and do a "du -sh *".  This command will take a while, but it will report the amount of space that each backup is taking. It should be obvious which ones failed (much smaller in space). You can confirmthey failed by looking at the summary files. I normally delete failed backup directories (so I don't assume they are there to restore from).

The next issue is disk usage. Each init does a "full" backup and does not take advantage of dirvish's (rsync's) ability to simply backup changes. This results in duplicate copies of files. If space is of no issue, you can not worry about this (and eventually as they age out this problem will fix itself). When this issue happens, I go to the directory above (my tree looks like /backups/server/file_system -- so I "cd /backups/server"). and then I run "hardlink file_systyem" and wait for it to finish (this may take a long time also). the hardlink command will identify all duplicate files and replace duplicates with hardlinks to one copy of the data (essentially what Dirvish/rsync does when making the backups). This will recover any "lost" space due to duplicate files.

In fact, I make it a practice to periodcally run hardlink on every vault to eliminate any duplicate files as a normal part of maintenance.

Isaac Traxler
LSU/LONI HPC Storage & Infrastructure Manager
traxler at lsu.edu

________________________________
From: dirvish <dirvish-bounces at lists.dirvish.org> on behalf of Rolf-Werner Eilert <rwe-sse at osnanet.de>
Sent: Wednesday, September 8, 2021 5:17 AM
To: dirvish at dirvish.org <dirvish at dirvish.org>
Subject: [Dirvish] One of the vaults broken - init enough?

I hope this list is still alive...

Some time ago I received a

21:45:44 /usr/sbin/dirvish --vault backup-home
backup-home:default:20210727-2145:
/mnt/backups/backup-home/dirvish/lock_file already exists

on the /home vault. After some days I looked it up and yes, I found a
lock file and deleted it, but it had no effect. So I decided to initiate
the /home vault again, then let it backup (only /home) once and went
into holidays.

Since then I get

21:24:51 /usr/sbin/dirvish --vault backup-home
backup-home:default:20210830-2124: ERROR: no images for branch default found

Guess I messed it up, but how can I re-initiate the /home? Of course,
the cronjob starts dirvish-runall, so do I have to expire all of them
first, then initiate again?

Thank you for your help!

Rolf


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