Hi there, On Mon, 3 Aug 2026, Ronald Colcernian wrote:
Sorry it took a while ...
No worries.
... Here is one example of an actual message: 2026-08-03 01:22:41 admin : BackupPC_refCountUpdate: ERROR pool file /bkpcdata/new_BackupPC_Data/cpool/1c/56/1d5621373a63a74a8872a46f02b40850 has digest d41d8...f8427e instead of 1d5621373a63a74a8872a46f02b40850 Note that digest d41d8.....427e is the digest of an empty file. I have about 48 of these messages from the last three days.
Hmmm. Did we ever talk about checking filesystem inegrity? Probably not an issue - well, the issue - but it's worth keeping an eye on it. Are you backing up files which are changing inbetween the time that the file is listed for backing up and the time that it gets backed up? In a large backup that can be quite a while. Ideally run backups when the filesystem is as quiet as possible. Can you let me see your configuration? You can send it privately if you prefer.
I have researched each of these and they all point to a zero sized file.
If the digests are d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e they will. :)
Understanding that, I ran the command find cpool -type f -size 0 | wc -l and there are 798 of these zero sized files.
They won't all be pool files, some will be LOCK files. But not as many as that - at most 128 will be LOCK files.
I have noticed that the nightly while it complains about these cpool file(s), it does not remedy it.
No, it doesn't know what to do.
I've spend a while reading backuppc-users email list, and have not really got a good answer, or course of action.
There's more on the BackupPC wiki, but see below.
1) Can I remediate by deleting those files, would be easy with a short bash script.
Rather than delete them, my preference would be to *move* them to some 'park/ in the filesystem for example /bkpcdata/new_BackupPC_Data/junk/ so that later I could see (1) the digests and (2) the timestamps etc. And only move the files that have 32-character MD5sum names that don't match the content!
2) Is there a way to take the "has digest number" and find the backup it came from?
There is. Over the years several scripts have been published; there's an explanation written by Craig in the Wiki, which would be exhausting to follow. This kind of thing seems to come up now and then so in the past few days I've put some work into a new script. See the Wiki at https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki/How-to-find-which-backups-reference-a-particular-digest It's intended to be a more comprehensive utility and easier to use. Please take it for a spin and let me have any feedback that you can. Something like this could eventually go into .../BackupPC/bin/.
3) I could with a bash script change the instead of digest to the zero file size digest.
Don't change the names of files in the pool, that won't help.
... years of running BackupPC, hard drive failures, rsync TopDir to a new machine (that was brutal BTW), conversion V3 to V4, and gross neglect.
Tell me about it. :) -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
