On 20/12/2025 12:00, [email protected] wrote:
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: For backup I use rsync onto a USB attached drive, > - but
sometimes it writes to the root filesystem! (John D)
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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:14:23 +0000
From: John D <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Dorset] For backup I use rsync onto a USB attached
drive, > - but sometimes it writes to the root filesystem!
Message-ID:
<vi0p189mb351800482e0c740392458a58a2...@vi0p189mb3518.eurp189.prod.outlook.com>
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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2025 15:27:26 +0000
From: Ralph Corderoy <[email protected]>
To: John D <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Dorset] For backup I use rsync onto a USB attached drive
- but sometimes it writes to the root filesystem!
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Hi John,
I have a drive with 2 main partitions; I plug it into a USB port and
run a script that chooses one of the partitions (using a "last
touched" test on a dummy file).
Does the script mount the chosen partition? Or could the script be
running the rsync before something else has mounted it?
No. Ubuntu automounts removable drives. I'll try disabling this.
That can be done with gsettings, but I discovered something I didn't
expect when trying it out. If I execute:
rsync -zriv --progress --ignore-existing /home/shareddocs/Photos
"/media/john/PHOTOS"
which is a line from my backup job, then it runs successfully even when
there is NOT a disk plugged in. The "mount point" /media/john/PHOTOS is
created in the root filesystem and off it goes!
Following up Ralph's suggestion that the device could be suffering I
found on the net several examples of WD Passport disks doing just that
and that is the model I have.
So, my hypothesis is that during a backup run the disk sometimes drops
out and, immediately, a path is created on the root filesystem and the
job continues.
To overcome that I seem to need a control job that observes what is
happening and aborts the copying when needed. This is my crude and
incomplete attempt:
Backup-control
let size=`df /|sed 1d| awk '{print $3}'|sed s/G//` #Read and save
filesystem size from "df /"
let limit=size+size/10 #Calculate a limit, e.g. size + 10%
let mypid=`Backup-rsync&` #start copying job, but this doesn't work,
#so how can I save the pid?
until
`df /|sed 1d| awk '{print $3}'|sed s/G//` > $limit
or
??? #saved pid does not exist
do
done
if ??? #saved mypid exists
then
kill mypid
echo "bad backup"
fi
I expect that observing for disk problems using dmesg would be better.
I'll look into that later.
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