I decided last night that it was going to be an early night... unfortunatly this didn't happen.
I started doing a little work on my thesis whilst I could be arsed although this didn't really last long. It got to about 2.30am and realised I'd not had an email telling me that my server backup had happened (usually arrives around that time)... I logged onto the machine to see what was happening... the backup mount hadn't mounted! So the backup was incremenally backing up nothing - backing up nothing takes not long at all... creating diff files for all of this does.
I now had two options... one being let the backup complete fully although this would be a ball ache as when I fixed the mounting issue I thought I'd have to back the whole drive up (30 gig over ADSL... not fun - I would have brought the drive home to do it)... or crash out of the backup 'causing it to fail - but due to the cunning way in which rdiff-backup works it'll realise the backup's failed undo all it had got to and start backing up correctly again on the next backup.
I opted for the crash out of it method... but the bloody thing wouldn't undo the half baked backup. Tits... maybe I've shafted the whole backup!
After about an hour of pratting around I managed to coherse it to undo the backup - I used the --check-destination-dir option on the backup box, not remotely, and moved some of the broken backup files out of the way - although not all of them, it was trial and error so I can't say for sure which files I moved and which ones I didn't for anyone else who's ended up in the same situation and found this entry. Do a ls -lt | head in the rdiff-backup-data directory and move some of the files out of the way that were created around the same time as when the backup failed (don't move the increments directory though!) - move them, don't remove them though as you might want to put them back if it didn't work... don't blame me if this breaks your backup more... that said if you've come hunting for this page then it's probably already screwed up somewhat!
Eventually I set it going with it's proper backup and went to bed. I looked at the clock and it was 4.04, I just can't find the time in a day to do all I want to do - and I'm not even doing much!
This morning I got a nice email from Amazon telling me about how much I've earned from referals in the last quarter, £6.06, not bad. Special thanks to the person who bought the Friends: Complete Series 1 - 10 (30 Disc Box Set).
Remember - bookmark and use my Amazon link for all your Amazon purchases. Make me happy!
Hidden in the post is tenuous geeky pun. Bonus points to who can find it and posts a comment!