Re: Missing pool files

Hi there,

On Tue, 7 Oct 2025, Jamie Burchell wrote:

> Out of the blue on the 24th September, my log showed:
> ...
> ...
> 2025-09-24 01:02:30  admin1 : BackupPC_refCountUpdate: missing pool file
> ee88a6fce8449682d6b4465f89b447ec count 19
>
> 2025-09-24 01:03:26  admin1 : BackupPC_refCountUpdate total errors: 9
> ...
> Logs prior to this show no missing pool files and logs after this show a
> decreasing number of missing files. Only one has remained:
> ...
> a06340ddb577fd02a04bda2998a8d246
> ...
> Curious which backup this pertains to, I found and run the script mentioned
> ...
> No log file is created and I cannot find a file named poolCnt.1.9f:
>
> $ ls /var/lib/BackupPC/pc/*/*/refCnt/poolCnt
>
> $ ls: cannot access '/var/lib/BackupPC/pc/*/*/refCnt/poolCnt': No such file
> or directory
> ...

Even if there were such files, your ls command wouldn't list them
because it looks for files named 'poolCnt' not 'poolCnt*'. :(

I recommend getting the hang of the 'find' utility, but be warned that
in my experience it's an acquired taste.  You could always pipe the
output of ls -lR into a pager (or grep) but the right utility will be
more efficient.

> I also can?t see what caused this to happen in the first place. ...
> Can anyone give any insight in to what is going on here ...

Did a machine experience a power failure, crash, or something like
that?  Perhaps someone restarted BackupPC at an inconvenient time?
Did you experiment with compression?  Manually fiddle with the pool?

> ... how I might be able to find out which file is missing?

BackupPC_poolCntPrint may give some useful information, see e.g.

https://sourceforge.net/p/backuppc/mailman/message/36379446/

The syntax isn't always obvious so here's an example using BackupPC_ls
much as Craig suggests in his post linked above, to list md5sums on a
box backed up here:

backuppc@server:$ /usr/local/BackupPC/bin/BackupPC_ls -R -h host44 -n 2072 -s Config / | head
/:
-rw-------       0/0          0 2013-06-27 13:09:27  /.pwd.lock (d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e)
drwxr-xr-x       0/0          0 2021-09-03 14:52:44  /ConsoleKit/
-rw-r--r--       0/0       1467 2019-01-18 15:26:02  /GeoIP.conf (fe5e3fdcd6ad284bb57e63fe41f4e553)
drwxr-xr-x       0/0          0 2015-05-03 19:19:43  /ImageMagick/
drwxr-xr-x       0/0          0 2024-03-20 07:44:44  /ImageMagick-6/
-rw-r--r--       0/0       4954 2021-01-25 18:10:07  /Muttrc (6793ae4ed35d7fa37a57e2b1fd1507e8)
[very big snip]

You'd grep your output for a06340ddb577fd02a04bda2998a8d246.

There might be more scripts kicking around on the mailing list to do
things like this, I can't recall, but sometimes random scripts need
bringing up to date.  So unless you like puzzles I'd recommend using
the tools provided before going off the reservation.

-- 

73,
Ged.


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