BiT wants to update snapshots; all snapshots gets deleted

[Nikke]

Hi
I'm running BiT 0.9.99.35~karmic from the launchpad testing PPA under lucid.

Each time I start BiT it says that the backup format has changed and that BiT needs to move my snapshots accordingly - even snapshots taken with this version (configured from scratch). If I choose not to, I cannot take any snapshots. If I choose to move the snapshots, BiT deletes my entire snapshot folder!

Analysing the problem, this is what I've found:
- When taking a snapshot, BiT sets the version of the snapshot to 3 (controlled by the constant SNAPSHOT_VERSION in common/snapshots.py)
- When starting BiT it calls has_old_snapshots which seems to returns true if there are any snapshots of version 3 (also in common/snapshots.py), and hence triggering the update-procedure
- During the update procedure it seems that BiT first moves the old snapshots to a new folder. However, the old and new folders are the same. Then BiT deletes the old folder - and as new and old folders are the same, the result is that the entire backup structure is deleted!

This is the console output when running backintime-gnome from the terminal:
Back In Time
Version: 0.9.99.35

Back In Time comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; type `backintime-gnome --license' for details.

INFO: Snapshot location update flag detected
WARNING: Snapshot location needs update
INFO: Update snapshot locations
INFO: Only 1 profile found
Check snapshot folder: /home/niklas/Desktop/testBiT
INFO: Folder of profile 1 is set to /home/niklas/Desktop/testBiT

Move snapshots from /home/niklas/Desktop/testBiT/backintime to /home/niklas/Desktop/testBiT/backintime
To move: ['20100504-104957-386']
Already there: ['20100504-104957-386']
Snapshots expected: ['20100504-104957-386', '20100504-104957-386']
Command "mv -f "/home/niklas/Desktop/testBiT/backintime/20100504-104957-386" "/home/niklas/Desktop/testBiT/backintime"" returns 256
Remove: 20100504-104957-386
Command "find "/home/niklas/Desktop/testBiT/backintime/20100504-104957-386" -type d -exec chmod u+wx {} \;" returns 0
Command "rm -rfv "/home/niklas/Desktop/testBiT/backintime/20100504-104957-386"" returns 0
Succes!

INFO: Update was successful. Snapshots of profile 1 are moved to their new location
INFO: BackinTime will be able to make new snapshots again!

[this is preceeded by a long list of all the files BiT removed as part of the update - i.e all the backed up files]

Hope this helps
/N

[Dave (dave2010)]

After some checking of the code - mainly for bug 572117 (the two bugs seem related but may not be duplicates):

In common/config.py:

        def get_snapshots_full_path( self, profile_id = None, version = None ):
                '''Returns the full path for the snapshots: .../backintime/machine/user/profile_id/'''
                if version is None:
                        version = self.get_int_value( 'config.version', 1 )

changing the last line to

                       version = self.get_int_value( 'config.version', self.CONFIG_VERSION )

allows me to successfully do a second backup from a fresh install. This doesn't necessarily help convert old backup formats to the new directory structure as I haven't tested that.

This does seem to fix doing a fresh install of 0.9.99.35 (or 32), doing a backup, and then running a second backup. With "1" BiT won't do the second backup because it thinks the config.version is 1 instead of 5 (CONFIG_VERSION) and gives the old version 1 style path of .../backintime/20100504... instead of the new version 5 style .../backintime/mymachine/username/3/20100504...

This doesn't handle converting from old formats

[Dave (dave2010)]

This appears to fix converting old formats as well

Removed BiT completely (all configs/backups/software)
Installed version 0.9.26
Started GUI, setup profile to backup a small directory
Made a few backups creating new files in test directory in between (stored into /mnt/backups/backintime/20100504...)
Uninstalled BiT (backup directory left)
Installed .9.99.35
Started GUI - prompted to convert, converted ok
Old backup directories moved to /mnt/backups/backintime/mymachine/username/1/xxx
New backups ok

[Dave (dave2010)]

Just to be clear - in the steps above, after Installing .9.99.35 I edited config.py to change the version= line before running the GUI for the first time.

If I run .9.99.35 without the fix first, then the 2010... directory will be in the wrong place. If I then apply the fix and run the GUI again it appears to get converted ok.

[Dan (danleweb)]

FIx commited. Thanks Dave

[Wolfram (woppl)]

I am running BiT 1.0.4 on Ubuntu 10.04. First backup seems o.k., but second time it wants to convert to new structure and deletes all backup into trash-folder.

Thought you have released a fix on this...Any suggestion how to solve?
Wolfram