Questions[rdiff-backup](ubuntu)

Other SE posts, for example this, show how you can install a specific package version. However, I'm unsure what exactly the naming convention / syntax used for the version I want is.

I need to install rdiff-backup version 1.2.8, but I'm unclear from looking through github (I'm a noob) what the full package version would be called. Edit: I should note that I did try the syntax of,

sudo apt-get install rdiff-backup=1.2.8

as well as

sudo apt-get install rdiff-backup=1.2.8-1ubuntu1 \

(the latter just blindly copying the syntax shown in the linked example, in the off chance it worked.)

And as the title states, the commands I've looked up that people say should list all or old versions of packages don't seem to work as intended (or as I understand them).

Thanks for your time.

I'm using rdiff-backup since a long time to pull backups over SSH to the backup-server. Recently rdiff-backup crashed with Errno 36. So I deleted the file which had the long name in the source. However, I can't get rdiff-backup to work again. I keep getting the following notice:

Previous backup seems to have failed, regressing destination now. Regressing to Tue Sep 11 02:07:50 2012 Exception '[Errno 36] File name too long: '....

The file name pointed out here is in the destination. I've checked the path, and there is no such file. So, the file is not in the source, nor in the destination, but I keep getting this error. I though it might be possible to get completely rid of the last failed backup info, to start from the last working one. That is actually what rdiff-backup is saying. But it keeps on falling over this file which does not exist anymore.

Any ideas?

Is there a database where it gets the info about this file from, and where I can remove it?

Thanks!

I've got an rdiff-backup setup that backs up a largeish sql dump (1.6GB) over a network. The server it's backing up to (Ubuntu 10.10 server) has a small local disk (4GB, 1GB free) but has a cifs mount to a large nas (plenty of free space). I've a softlink set up from a user account's home dir to the NAS cifs mount, and the rdiff-backup job initiated from the client is writing to that directory.

Recently, the job has been failing. The logfile says:

Sun Oct 24 21:20:14 2010 Sending back exception [Errno 28] No space left on device of type type 'exceptions.IOError'

I've run the job manually with watch df running on the server, and I can see the 1GB of free space on the local drive diminishing until it hits zero. Then the job fails. To be clear, disk space is not an issue on the NAS.

So, for some reason, rdiff-backup is using somewhere on the local disk as a temp working directory rather than the actual directory where the backups are stored, on the NAS device, as I'd expect. However, I can't find which dir it's using so I can mount that separately with its own blob of space. Doing du -sx on / while the job is running reveals the total filesize of / remaining constant at 3.0GB, even though df says / is full.

If I list the file handles open by the rdiff process, I get a few sockets and some files on NAS mount. Nothing obvious on the local disk.

What's going on? Why does df say / is full, but du -sx say there's 1GB free? Why is rdiff-backup filling up the local disk when it should be using the cifs mount? What's it actually writing to?

Question says it all:

What happens if rsnapshot or rdiff-backup gets interrupted in the middle of a transfer?

I know that rsnapshot tries to make a complete snapshot of your system in rotating fashion, and rdiff-backup makes a differential backup, which is going to be based on the files previously saved behind it.

So: What happens if it gets interrupted in the middle?

Does this result in an "incomplete snapshot"?

Will other snapshots which are dependent on this one be corrupted? (Surely not, but... ?)

I'm a bit confused about doing backups with rsync/rdiff-backup / rsnapshot via SSH.

I've been looking at utilities such as backupninja and rsnapshot. These are rsync / rdiff based backup systems, capable of being scheduled to do backups over SSH. Reading the manual pages, it seems to be leading me to believe it is only possible to configure these utilities to pull FROM the client TO the server, whereas I thought it was possible to schedule these to push TO the server FROM the client. Am I mistaken here?

Meaning:

I want to have my laptop running the rdiff-backup / rsnapshot utility via cron to back up to my home server.

1. My laptop runs cron job nightly (if it's on home network) ... and connects via SSH to my home server, (because my server has the static IP address and not vice versa)
2. Laptop pushes data to backup directory on server.
3. If laptop is not on home network, it does not perform backup.

Am I doing this backwards?

...

UPDATE:

I have currently installed rsnapshot on the server machine, and gotten it running pulling backups manually from the laptop, but I still think this seems to make more sense to have the laptop push to the server, because it's only going to be connected at home intermittently.

Still waiting for a response on whether this is the proper way to be doing this, or whether the reverse order (server pulling from laptop) is appropriate method. Input please?