Re: ctime changes under cpool

Hi there,

On Sat, 1 Aug 2026, martin f krafft wrote:

> Trying to figure out an off-site mirror strategy for my BackupPC store,

It's *well* worth looking through the archives of this mailing list
for that kind of thing.  You might need to go back quite a long way.

> I take note that lots of files under cpool have their `ctime` changed
> regularly, e.g.:
>
> ```
> % stat /srv/backuppc/cpool/d2/58/d259d622983aa9b756021b50df69a6ea
>   File: /srv/backuppc/cpool/d2/58/d259d622983aa9b756021b50df69a6ea
>   Size: 4417      	Blocks: 16         IO Block: 4096   regular file
> Device: 253,0	Inode: 27857695    Links: 1
> Access: (0445/-r--r--r-x)  Uid: (  111/backuppc)   Gid: (  117/backuppc)
> Access: 2026-07-01 10:14:34.261213443 +0200
> Modify: 2026-07-01 10:14:34.261213443 +0200
> Change: 2026-08-01 02:15:16.559765952 +0200
>  Birth: 2026-07-01 10:14:34.261213443 +0200
>  ```
>
> At 2:15 last night, it seems that a refCountUpdate was running (which
> incidentally reported 23 errors of missing and unexpectedly empty
> files).

Could you let me know more about those files?  I don't much care for
'unexpectedly' in things to do with backups.

> Does this process randomly update `ctime`s of files?

No.  It does it for a reason. :)

> Why?

It marks them as being ready for deletion.  The changed file has its
-rwxrwxrwx flags set as if by 'chmod o+x', see BackupPCrefCountUpdate
around line 1044 in sub cleanPoolFiles.

> Can I prevent this?

Not if you want it to continue to delete unused pool files.

-- 

73,
Ged.


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