Matt Hyclak schreef:
On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 05:18:51PM -0700, Cameron Matheson enlightened us:
I've recently gotten the appropriate holes cut in my firewall that allow
me to backup my mail server. The problem is that Maildirs don't seem to
want to be backed up... the backups fail, w/ hundreds of errors like
these in the logs:
?gtar:./home/vmail/fjcomm.com/V/foo.bar/new/1137800711.V805Iac017.zena.tonservices.com:
Warning: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
I tried googling for what exactly 'Cannot stat' means, but I didn't come
up w/ anything too conclusive. Anyway, why exactly should there be so
many hundreds of these erros (mostly confined to one or two users
mailboxes (but different users every night). If i don't back up the
Maildirs, that server backs up just fine. It doesn't seem like these
mailboxes should be changing *that* much overnight (maybe i'm wrong?).
Maildir moves the files from the new/ directory to the cur/ directory when
they've been accessed. Usually this means that the user (or the user's mail
program) was running between the estimates being done and the backup being
performed.
To be precise: not between the estimate and backup (which could be
hours), but between gnutar reading the list of filenames in a directory,
and trying to read the file itself (much smaller time window).
Note also that this kind of errors is not fatal: the backup should have
succeeded (note the questionmark before the line: question marks flag
"strange" lines in the stderr of tar: it's up to you to decide if that
is bad or not, e.g. it could be a harddisk error or filesytem corruption
too. Amanda itself, nor gnutar, see this as fatal.
If the backup did fail, amanda would discard the dump completely.
I think that was not the case, is it?
PS. If the OS supports it, you can use snapshots to avoid these problems.
--
Paul Bijnens, Xplanation Tel +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM Fax +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/ email: Paul.Bijnens AT xplanation DOT com
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