the .gvfs directory in a user's home directory causes rsnapshot to take an incorrect backup

Bug #247777 reported by Sameer D. Sahasrabuddhe
16
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
gvfs (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned
rsnapshot (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: rsnapshot

When rsnapshot calls rsync to backup user directories, an I/O error is encountered because the .gvfs directory is not readable by root. As a result rsync skips deleting of files as it is supposed to, and the result is a backup with deleted files lying around.

I added ".gvfs" to the list of excluded files in rsnapshot for this to work correctly. But this might be needed as a default setting, since it affects any GNOME user. One problem with this is that there needs to be a list of such files with a known special behaviour. Setting "--ignore-errors" in the rsync arguments is also a possibility, but that would be overkill, and might lose files in case of I/O errors when file deletion should indeed have been skipped.

I am running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.

description: updated
Revision history for this message
Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson) wrote :

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 225361, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.

Changed in gvfs:
status: New → Invalid
Changed in rsnapshot:
status: New → Invalid
Revision history for this message
Neal McBurnett (nealmcb) wrote :

It appears that the mitigation, if it ever arrives, for bug #225361 is not going to help here.

For rsnapshot and other backup tools, the documentation and example configuration file should note this issue, along with any other common related issues in fuse or wherever, so that people properly exclude these tricky paths.

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