Hi, Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote on 2008-10-30 03:55:16 -0400 [[BackupPC-users] Duplicate files in pool with same CHECKSUM and same CONTENTS]: > I have found a number of files in my pool that have the same checksum > (other than a trailing _0 or _1) and also the SAME CONTENT. Each copy > has a few links to it by the way. > > Why is this happening?
presumably creating a link sometimes fails, so BackupPC copies the file, assuming the hard link limit has been reached. I suspect problems with your NFS server, though not a "stale NFS file handle" in this case, since copying the file succeeds. Strange. > Isn't this against the whole theory of pooling. Well, yes :). But the action of copying the file when the method to implement pooling (hard links) does not work for some reason (max link count reached, or NFS file server errors if you think about it - you *do* get some level of pooling; otherwise you'd have an independant copy or a missing file each time linking fails) is perfectly reasonable. > It also doesn't seem > to get cleaned up by BackupPC_nightly since that has run several times > and the pool files are now several days old. BackupPC_nightly is not supposed to clean up that situation. It could be designed to do so (the situation may arise when a "link count overflow" is resolved by expired backups), but it would be horribly inefficient: for the file to be eliminated, you would have to find() every occurrence of the inode in all pc/* trees and replace them with links to the duplicate(s) to be kept. You don't want that. > What can I do to clean it up? Fix your NFS server? :) Is there a consistent maximum number of links, or do the copies seem to happen randomly? Honestly, I don't think the savings you may gain from storing the pool over NFS are worth the headaches. What is cheaper about putting a large disk into a NAS device than into your BackupPC server? Well, yes, you can share it ... how about exporting part of the disk from the BackupPC server (I would still recommend distinct partitions)? Regards, Holger ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/