Re: Can I interrupt an rdiff-backup backup?

Hi Robert

Many thanks for the reply.  Your answer explains why there's no activity 
on the local drive but steady activity on the remote drive (as well as 
what rdiff-backup is doing, of course).

I'm going to delete the lot and start again, but I have a problem 
deleting the rdiff-backup-data directory

below is what happens.  I'd be grateful for any solutions.  This is 
Ubuntu 22.04 in case it's not obvious.

mike@TV-PC:/media/primary/backups/Mike-PC/Projects$ rm -rfv 
rdiff-backup-data
removed 'rdiff-backup-data/.fuse_hidden0014522e000000c4'
removed 'rdiff-backup-data/.fuse_hidden0014522f000000c1'
removed 'rdiff-backup-data/.fuse_hidden00145a71000000c2'
removed 'rdiff-backup-data/.fuse_hidden00145fa2000000c3'
rm: cannot remove 'rdiff-backup-data': Directory not empty
mike@TV-PC:/media/primary/backups/Mike-PC/Projects$ ls rdiff-backup-data
mike@TV-PC:/media/primary/backups/Mike-PC/Projects$ ls -la rdiff-backup-data
total 804
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root   4096 Jan 21 12:47 .
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root    464 Jan 21 04:40 ..
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root      0 Jan 21 04:00 .fuse_hidden0014522e000000c5
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 220862 Jan 21 07:11 .fuse_hidden0014522f000000c6
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 572052 Jan 21 08:31 .fuse_hidden00145a71000000c7
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root  23842 Jan 21 04:13 .fuse_hidden00145fa2000000c8

On 21/01/2023 15:18, Robert Nichols wrote:
> On 1/21/23 5:29 AM, Mike Hart wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> I've just started using rdiff-backup (rd-b), which I think is a great 
>> program.  I started an initial backup that I expected to take about 3 
>> days, but during the night my computer decided to reboot or at least 
>> close down the window running rd-b (amongst others).
>>
>> I have re-started rd-b but as far as I can see there is no disk 
>> activity at all on the local disk. There does appear to be some 
>> activity on the Server (remote disk) which makes me think that rd-b 
>> is caught in an infinite loop of some sort.
>
> The server is undoing the failed backup. This is a very lengthy 
> operation. Since this is your initial backup, it will be faster to log 
> into the server and simply delete the entire archive for this computer.
>
> Unless this "3 days" is just due to a a slow network, this has the 
> potential to be a big problem in the future. If a subsequent 
> incremental backup should fail, the server could take that much time 
> or more to regress the archive to the last successful backup.
>