Hi there, On Thu, 10 Jul 2025, Dave Bachmann wrote:
I am trying to see if I can recover a file that may have been deleted years ago and *may* be on a very old backup disk. The backups were done with a v3 version of BackupPC and I've done what I thought was required to make that disk usable but it's still not working right. So far, I've tried all the suggestions I could find in the documentation and online yet still have the same problems - I can see the dates and info about all of the backups on each of the hosts as all of the log files seems to still be intact, but trying to access the contents always generates messages like: "Error: Directory /var/lib/backuppc/pc/XXXXXX/49 is empty" and, of course, it is empty.
Have you tried using the 'BackupPC_ls' script?
The pool structure looks normal, but there are no files in pool/aa/aa for example
That's more or less as I'd expect if the backups are compressed. I say 'more or less' because my uncompressed pool is entirely empty.
while the Cpool structure is filled with reasonable looking filenames in folders like cpool/aa/aa.
Can you be more specific about the 'reasonable looking filenames'?
I've tried running "BackupPC_migrateV3toV4 -av"
If you've successfully converted a V3 backup to a V4 backup then the names of the files in .../cpool/aa/aa should be digests. The first four characters of each name will be 'aaaa', 'aaab', 'abaa' or 'abab'. What I would call reasonable-looking filenames will be under the tree at .../pc/host/<backupnumber>/. Here's an example from my backups: (I have aliased 'l' to 'ls -lrt' in my bash profile and the backup server is not really called 'backupserver':) backupserver:/var/lib/BackupPC$ >>> l total 12 drwxr-x--- 16 backuppc backuppc 4096 Dec 1 2024 pc drwxr-x--- 2 backuppc backuppc 4096 Jan 6 2025 pool drwxr-x--- 130 backuppc backuppc 4096 Jul 10 07:58 cpool backupserver:/var/lib/BackupPC$ >>> l pc/laptop3/1986/ total 36 -rw-r----- 1 backuppc backuppc 0 Jul 10 06:00 attrib_d7b4879008be7535abe378a001211f00 drwxr-x--- 7 backuppc backuppc 4096 Jul 10 06:00 inode drwxr-x--- 223 backuppc backuppc 12288 Jul 10 06:09 fConfig drwxr-x--- 6 backuppc backuppc 4096 Jul 10 06:09 fHomes -rw-r----- 1 backuppc backuppc 583 Jul 10 06:16 backupInfo drwxr-x--- 2 backuppc backuppc 12288 Jul 10 06:20 refCnt backupserver:/var/lib/BackupPC$ >>> l pool/ total 0 piplus:/var/lib/BackupPC$ >>> ls cpool/aa/aa aaaa01d2d42e7572fc4cf5ec83f700e3 aaaa7334a2d53adff96cb26bc800a815 ... ... ... -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
