Topic: backup2: negative compression? [SORTED]

[judgej]

SORTED: It does appear that it was a rogue /dev/zero that got caught up in the backup.


I'm running backup2 to a USB disk, with compression turned off (level 0). It has been running for a couple of hours now.

In total, the server contains about 80G of files, images, audio and e-mails. Essentially a lot of it is umpressible binary data.

Now, so far, the backup has written 130G to the USB disk (up to part202.rar, with 650M parts), and is showing no signs of reaching the end. Is this normal, or is something going wrong here? If I did not know better, I would assume the backup was stuck in some infinite loop.

I'm using the '911 backup' options. Once I've done one full backup, I intend to split the backup into several parts, with less frequent backups of the more archivable areas.#

The log file shows that approx 200,000 files have been added to the backup, which would sounds about right (though I would have expected perhaps a few more, but in the right ballpark). I would expect a little overhead in creating the rar files, but not 100%-plus.

Any ideas?

-- JJ

[judgej]

That's 80Gbytes to back up onto a 260G backup disk, and it does not fit

[judgej]

I may have this sorted now. I had a backup of an old server, dumped into an i-bay. The backup including a copy of /dev from the original server. What I didn't realise is that the block devices in this copy were fully functional (a surprise to me). I expect when the backup hit ~myibay/old-server/dev/zero it kind of got stuck, backing up an infinate stream of zeros.

That's what I assume was happening. I'm rerunning a backup now, so will find out in a few hours...

-- JJ