[Borgbackup] Failsafe?

[public at enkore.de]

In regards to backup monitoring I would recommend to send mails after
every succeeded *and* failed backup. If they stop coming you know
something's up (ditto if they report failures).

In regards to locking, there have been some improvements in most
releases of the 1.0 series and there are efforts to improve it for 1.1
(eg. https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/1246 ). Scripting it is
possible, making that safe may not be so simple, even if it is assured
externally (cron?) that tasks won't overlap.

Ie. we're aware that this is a pain point and try to do better.

Cheers, Marian

On 17/08/16 20:09, Stan Armstrong wrote:
> Back in January I had established a backup system consisting of a single
> repository and several archives that served to backup my startup SSD and
> my main data HD, both locally and to my wife's backup drive. I used
> several simple scripts and crontab to manage the timings and persistence
> for various of these backups. The scripts also run tests and lists and
> keep the results in a borg log directory. I tested the setup for a few
> months and was quite happy with it.
> 
> Then two things happened. First my main data drive began to fail and had
> to be sent to data drive heaven. I was able to manually copy some of my
> data from it to another drive before I retired the failing drive. Then I
> found that borg had stopped making backups some months ago due to lock
> files appearing. I had neglected to check from time to time in recent
> months to be sure the backups were still being made.
> 
> I had hoped that once my backup system was in place, I could forget
> about it. Live and learn. Does anyone have a (semi)automatic way of
> checking for lock files? I plan on writing a script that would
> periodically check for lock files and, if no borg was running, would use
> break-lock. Have any of you done this already? There must be a one-liner
> that would perform the required lock testing on all of my archives. I'm
> lazy enough not to want to struggle to reinvent the wheel.
> 
> PS In trying to locate the most recent copies of some of the files and
> directories that perished with the failed drive, I used "borg mount" for
> the first time today. What a great time saver.
> 
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