wrong base for incremental backup

Bug #662404 reported by Peter Surňák
10
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
sbackup
Triaged
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

What I did:
1. created "default" profile to /backup
2. made backup (bkp_1: 10.8 GB full)
--- about an hour later ---
3. created "another" profile to /backup (and added few excludes to default)
4. made backup (bkp_2: 100 MB inc for "default" with base being bkp_1; bkp_3 1.2 GB for "another" with base being bkp_2)
--- about 15 minutes later ---
5. made backup (bkp_4: 6.7 GB inc for "default" with base being bkp_3; bkp_5 1.2 GB for "another" with base being bkp_4)

What is wrong:
Obviously nothing changed in files which would result in 6.7 GB increment (in case of "default") or 1.2 increment (in case of "another"). The problem is wrong base. Each backup takes the other as a base and since do not have anything in common, virtually full backups are made all the time.
The problem is that two independent backups in the same directory are taken as bases for each other.

This can be counted as wrong usage, I agree, but I think program should somehow check for this and at least warn user that such setting may lead to bad results (yep, backups exist, but not very incremental, so disk space would eat pretty quickly).
Of course, I will change my setup and re-backup everything, but the point is there could be other users with similar "wrong" setup and not knowing what goes on under the hood of "simple backup".

Note:
I did not try to restore using this setup, but I think it could be pretty dangerous.

System:
Ubuntu 10.10 64bit
sbackup 0.11.3 - comes from distribution repository

Revision history for this message
Jean-Peer Lorenz (peer.loz) wrote :

Thank you for using SBackup and for taking the time reporting this bug. I confirm this bug. However, I'll set its importance to 'Wishlist' as it requires some deep modifications to the source code.

Workaround: create subdirectories for each profile.

Thanks for your help.

Changed in sbackup:
status: New → Confirmed
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
Changed in sbackup:
status: Confirmed → Triaged
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