"backup" behavior and corrupted file

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

Hiya, droki!

Welcome.

I'm sorry it took this long before anyone replied to your mail.

On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 5:57 AM, droki <droki at riseup.net> wrote:
>
> I'm having trouble running "tahoe backup" involving two different
> issues. First, my backup command keeps getting stuck on a single file.
> It just hangs on the file.
>
> In fact, this behavior isn't limited to "backup", when I run "tahoe
> check URI:CHK:..." on the URI in question I get the same result - it
> just hangs.

We're currently diagnosing a similar issue that a couple of users are
having with the LeastAuthority.com S4 service. Are you using S4? If
so, you're another S4 user having this problem, and we could use your
help investigating it. If not, then this is surprising because I
thought the bug was in the S4 backend, so if you're having this bug
*without* using the S4 backend, please let us know!


> This brings me to my second issue. I was trying to work around this
> problem and thought "I'll just make a whole new backup."  So I ran
> "tahoe backup" and specified a new directory as the destination. But I
> saw that tahoe was still skipping all the files that had previously been
> backed up, so it wasn't creating  a new complete backup. Is this the
> intended behavior?

Yes, it re-uses the already-uploaded files that are already in the
Tahoe-LAFS grid. It links to them from the newly created backup. Make
sense?

> And, even when specifying a new destination, the backup command got
> stuck on the same URI.

Same problem as above. If you're an S4 customer, please send email to
support at LeastAuthority.com. If not, or even if so, please reply to
this letter to tahoe-dev. :-)

> How can I create a totally new backup?

I don't think it would help to re-upload the files that are already
successfully in the grid, but if you want that you could rm the backup
database and next time you ran "tahoe backup" it would reupload them.

(Then they would get de-duped on the server side, so it wouldn't use
any more server space after upload.)


>  What should I think of this bad URI?

Our current hypothesis is that it is a bug in the S4 backend which is
somehow data-dependent or sticky so that it applies only to certain
files, but does to with 100% reproducibility after it gets triggered.
Daira is investigating right now, so stay tuned, or send us
information about which S4 account is yours and which file of yours
hangs to help us debug it.

Thanks!

Regards,

Zooko