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bubba-backup - how does it work?

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dsudar
Posts: 7
Joined: 03 Aug 2007, 00:40

bubba-backup - how does it work?

Post by dsudar »

Hi all,

I'm running the regular 2.6.0.3 on my B3 and want to set up auto-backup to a USB drive (NTFS-formatted 2TB drive). I set up the backup using the GUI and all seems well and somehow it starts. However, it appears to first make a copy of the entire to-be-backed-up dataset (/home/<users>) in the /tmp directory. That of course filled up my / filesystem to 100% and the backup then failed with:
2016/01/30 02:34:09 [30442] rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 4 bytes to socket [sender]: Broken pipe (32)
2016/01/30 02:34:09 [30442] rsync: write failed on "/tmp/tmptA1NU_/backup_b3_data/home/dsudar/Documents
So my questions:
1) where are bubba-backup's configuration files and scripts so I can see what it's trying to do and fix things that are not right? I don't even see anything in crontab; how does this thing work at all?
2) is there an issue with using a NTFS-formatted external disk for this? If NTFS is no good, is FAT32 okay?
3) is bubba-backup maybe not so robust and should I just use rsync and cron to do my backups?

Thanks for any pointers,
- Damir
86ivar
Posts: 148
Joined: 02 Oct 2010, 11:08

Re: bubba-backup - how does it work?

Post by 86ivar »

I struggeled to get the bubbabackup to work too. Always some issues so I ended using rsync scripts instead, or just run the command directly over ssh by smartphone.
Gordon
Posts: 1461
Joined: 10 Aug 2011, 03:18

Re: bubba-backup - how does it work?

Post by Gordon »

Don't really know the original paths, but the backup routine is called `bubba-run-backupjobs`. The location of the config files is at the top of that file.

Looking at the code it appears that the script attempts to mount the disk in /tmp/[unique] and somehow does not recognize that it fails in doing so. The result is that it fills your root partition because /tmp/[unique] is still a valid location to write to.

If you find what's wrong, can you report back?
dsudar
Posts: 7
Joined: 03 Aug 2007, 00:40

Re: bubba-backup - how does it work?

Post by dsudar »

Hi guys,

Indeed, going with regular rsync scripts and cron is probably easier but I'm continuing to see if the bubba-backup system can actually work for what I need.

Thanks for pointing me at "bubba-run-backupjobs". I did find one thread on the forum that provides some more insight: http://forum.mybubba.org/viewtopic.php? ... 26&p=25036
Both you (Gordon) and Johannes gave some good pointers in that.

Meanwhile, I did indeed figure out that a NTFS disk mounts read-only and your explanation of it trying to mount something on /tmp and failing and then fulling up /tmp makes perfect sense. I reformatted the disk as ext3 and now the backup works correctly.

But still some issues so I'll look at those scripts. One issue: the underlying rsync call doesn't seem to get the -a (or -o -g) options so everything on the backup is now owned by root.

Cheers,
- Damir
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