backintime icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
backintime copied to clipboard

Mark to-be-deleted snapshots in case deletion gets interrupted

Open Germar opened this issue 10 years ago • 2 comments

The deletion of a snapshot, performed by the automatic and/or smart removal, may take a while, especially if the snapshot contains many files and/or if it's on a slow NAS. Also, the deletion process may be interrupted and restarted at a later time (think about a system shutdown, for instance, while deletion is in progress, or a broken connection in case of a remote backup without "deletion in the background" option). This means that a snapshot may remain "partial" if its deletion was started but never finished. If you don't know about this condition, you may think it's a complete snapshot while it isn't and you may lose data if you try to restore files from it.

This improvement is to "mark" a snapshot being deleted just before deletion starts, for instance by renaming its folder to something like deleting or deleting or such. This would make explicit that the snapshot is likely to be partial because it is being deleted. The most critical part is to make BIT recognize a partially deleted "marked" folder to be deleted again if the previous deletion was interrupted (mainly because it has a different naming convention).


Imported from Launchpad using lp2gh.

  • date created: 2015-09-09T21:56:13Z
  • owner: mauromol
  • the launchpad url was https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1494027

Germar avatar Oct 11 '15 16:10 Germar

(by germar) You're right. Would be good to add this. Maybe we can change the remote smart remove process to choose and delete those 'marked' snapshots, too.

Germar avatar Oct 11 '15 19:10 Germar

I am also wondering if snapshots should be deleted before or after taking a new snapshot successfully (if the backup fails I may have lost an existing snapshot if deletion is done before taking a snapshot...)

aryoda avatar Nov 09 '22 00:11 aryoda