Unsuccessful backups should be handled differently

[dagwieers]

If a backup fails for whatever reason, the next backup starts with a broken copy, which basically means it may restart copying even if an older backup would be a better fit.

I have had various reasons why an rbme backup failed:

• system was shut down before it finished
• disk full conditions
• recursive download ad infinitum

And the next sync would not pick up the previous copy. So if aware of the situation I have to go and remove the broken copy first. However you cannot easily find which copies are broken, because a tree is huge to compare (especially on slower/network disks).

I would prefer if rbme would move aside the unsuccessful backup (rename it .fail or something) so that rsync will not consider it for using the next backup.

[schlomo]

Yes, indeed. I just removed the directories of an aborted backup. One solution would be that after a succesful sync a marker file gets written. If the marker is missing, then the probably broken backup dir will be erased first thing when rbme starts. That way we could have this feature per-host.

[dagwieers]

Yes, that would work.