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

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