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"backup or restore" loops forever

B. Rupp

"backup or restore" loops forever
« on: October 18, 2000, 11:33:06 PM »
Dear All,

I'm having problems with the automatic backup/restore function in e-smith. It's installed on a P166, 96MB RAM, 20GB UDMA-66 drive. I have about 16GB of data in 3 ibays on this server. When I hit the button "backup or restore" in the administration console of e-smith-manager, it just stays there forever ("Please wait a moment"). I have tried many OSs and Browsers, with and without proxy settings but nothing works. Even after a few hours there is no sign of advance. I don't know whether the server actually does something because in Linux the HDD LED unregularily flashes anyway.

When I had the e-smith server freshly installed it calculated the size of the backup (~65000 bytes by then) and I could download and save the file on my desktop machine. This leads to my speculation that the server cannot handle that much data.

I'd really like to use the included backup/restore function as it's so easy. Is there such a limitation? What are possible workarounds?

Thanks
Beat

Charlie Brady

RE: "backup or restore" loops forever
« Reply #1 on: October 19, 2000, 06:43:48 AM »
B. Rupp wrote:

> When I had the e-smith server freshly installed it calculated
> the size of the backup (~65000 bytes by then) and I could
> download and save the file on my desktop machine. This leads to
> my speculation that the server cannot handle that much data.

There is no arbitrary limitation.  The system does need to effectively backup the data twice, once into a black hole in order to calculate the size, then the second to produce the output file.

> I'd really like to use the included backup/restore function as
> it's so easy. Is there such a limitation? What are possible
> workarounds?

The limitation on backup is effectively the reliability of your network, and the amount of free space on the workstation that you backup to. But it sounds like your problem is the time that it takes to estimate the size, not the backup itself.

The first thing I would try to investigate is to log in as root, and do:

du -s /home/e-smith

See how long it takes, and what the resultant size is.

Charlie

B. Rupp

RE: "backup or restore" loops forever
« Reply #2 on: October 19, 2000, 01:20:11 PM »
Thanks for replying so fast!

du -s /home/e-smith

gives me the following output within ~3 seconds:

15407936        /home/e-smith  

My network has never had any problems, neither performance wise nor reliability related. e-smith should at least display the size of the backup file. Whether I then have enough space on the desktop computer to actually save it, that's my problem I think. dmesg doesn't show up anything bad and this server has been running for about two years with Linux, too.

What else could I do?

Thanks,
Beat

steve

RE: "backup or restore" loops forever
« Reply #3 on: October 21, 2000, 09:21:42 AM »
hi. this problem is also occuring to me...
i have been waiting 45 minutes now (to back up a 1.5 gig harddrive!).....
does anyone else have this problem?  is there any way to fix or workaround it?