Error exits on busy systems

John Goerzen <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.sysutils.backup.dar.support
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hello,

First, thank you for dar!

I am using dar as part of a script to back up in-use systems.  I 
have observed two nonzero exit codes from dar:

code 11 - when a file has been modified in-place

code 5 - when a file has "disappeared".  This happened once while 
a person was running rm -rf on a git checkout of a Linux kernel 
tree.

So my questions are:

1) Does dar actually abort backup generation in these cases, or 
does it store up the error and just exit with it after the rest of 
the backup proceeds?

2) Is there a way to cause dar to treat these as warnings and 
proceed?  Having a backup fail due to these common race conditions 
is, for me, much worse than having a backup succeed with warnings. 
That is, I could get 500,000 good files backed up and 5 weird 
ones, or 0 good files backed up.

I have tried --retry-on-change 20:104857600 which seems to have 
reduced the instances of code 11.  But I can't find a way to 
*eliminate* them, or to eliminate the error code when a file has 
disappeared.

I have seen these situations with tar, and it basically treats 
them as a warning.  I understand there is a case to be made for 
them being an error, but in situations where I don't have the 
ability to back up from a snapshot of some sort, it is far 
preferable for me to get a pretty good backup than no backup at 
all.

Thanks,

John
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