jrm_dantz Posted August 24, 2008 Report Share Posted August 24, 2008 My configuration: server: Mac G4 MDD running 10.5.4 and Retrospect 6.1.230 client: Fedora 9, running Retroclient 7.6.100 What's up: Overall, the server and client are working fine; backups are happening. However, the backups are incomplete: some Linux directories are geting backed up, while others don't. For instance, in the /var directory, Retrospect is backing up account, db, lib, local, lock, named, run, spool, www, and yp; it's not backing up cache, cvs, empty, ftp, games, log, nis, opt, preserve, and racoon. I've run a full backup and an incremental, and these directories are picked up on neither. Permissions on the directories seem fine; root owns them all the way down, and they're all read-enabled. Plus, if I set up one of these directories as a subvolume and include it in the list of Sources for the backup script, the directory and its files are detected and backed up. It seems that, once Retrospect knows the files are there, it's happy to back them up; it's just not finding those directories as part of its sweep of the file system. I of course have no idea what other directories might be missing from the backup. Any ideas? This seems pretty serious to me... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted August 24, 2008 Report Share Posted August 24, 2008 Do you see these directories when you browse the root of the volume from Configure>volumes? Linux is not my strong area so hopefully one of the other forum members will have a better suggestions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrm_dantz Posted August 24, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 24, 2008 Yes, they're all there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted August 24, 2008 Report Share Posted August 24, 2008 When you browse the snapshot for a restore, do the files show up under Files Chosen? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrm_dantz Posted August 25, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 25, 2008 No, they don't. The only ones that are there are the ones that seemed to be getting backed up in the first place -- account, db, lib, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrm_dantz Posted August 25, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 25, 2008 For what it's worth, I was able to replicate this behavior on a second running a virtually clean installation of Fedora 9. Looking at the /var directory, the same subdirectories were (and were not) backed up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrm_dantz Posted August 26, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 26, 2008 A few more data points in this: * I added /var as a subvolume, and it seemed to pick up the directories and files that had been omitted from the previous backups. * Several directories were missing from /home/ -- these seemed to be ones that were empty. For instance, if there was nothing along or at the bottom of /home/joeuser/a/b/c, neither a, b, nor c would be backed up. Help? I'm rather concerned about how much I can trust these backups. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted August 27, 2008 Report Share Posted August 27, 2008 * Several directories were missing from /home/ -- these seemed to be ones that were empty. For instance, if there was nothing along or at the bottom of /home/joeuser/a/b/c, neither a, b, nor c would be backed up. Yes, empty folders are backed up, in a sense, through the catalog, but no files are backed up because the folder are, um, empty. Getting them to be restored as empty folders is a bit, um, odd, and I've had this issue with the interface for a long time, but the procedure is documented and does work: From the Retrospect Read Me: Empty folders (finding, selecting, and restoring): Retrospect's Find facility and selectors do not find or select empty folders, nor does Retrospect restore empty folders when no files are selected for restoring. To make sure your empty folders are restored when you restore an entire volume, select "Restore an entire disk" from the initial dialog and make sure that "Restore Entire Disk" appears in the pop-up menu of destination actions. The only true workaround of which I am aware is to always restore to a Retrospect "subvolume" (define a subtree of the filesystem for that, just for restoration purposes), then restore "entire disk" to that subvolume. Grumble. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrm_dantz Posted September 15, 2008 Author Report Share Posted September 15, 2008 Thanks for the pointer re empty directories -- I think I had seen that before, but had forgotten about it. That clears up a lot, but there are still weirdnesses taking place in /var. I just did a clean backup of my clean Fedora 9 box, and it's failing to back up /var/log and /var/cache, both of which have stuff in them. Plus, new weirdnesses: I looked for other directories called "log", and found /usr/share/cvs/contrib/log. That has something in it, and it's not backed up. Also, none of the /sys directory is getting backed up, and there's definitely stuff down in there. The suspicious person in me is wondering whether there might be some code somewhere in the Linux client that is deciding for me that, for whatever reason, I don't want to bother backing up. Crazy, huh? I could look around more, but I've done about all the free QA work I can justify. Does anyone have any other thoughts? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted September 15, 2008 Report Share Posted September 15, 2008 Do you have any selectors specified? If so, could you provide a screenshot of that selector's conditions (not merely the name of the selector, because the conditions could have been changed). I've done more than all the free help I can justify. If you don't want to spend more time on this to solve the problem, that's fine with me. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrm_dantz Posted September 15, 2008 Author Report Share Posted September 15, 2008 Aah, I was going to mention that. No, there are no selectors involved at all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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