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aavanzi1976

Member

Registered: 2022-03-17

Posts: 2

Sorting progress error when repairing

Hello,

I'm playing with XSIBackup-Free 1.5.1.9 before purchasing a license for the Pro version.
During my tests, I'm using as destination an external USB disk mounted to a Linux host, and I use ssh for the remote destination host.

I ran into a problem when I tried to repair a backup that has been interrupted by Ctrl-C.
A subsequent backup job printed the message:

2022-03-17T06:32:09 | Error code 4178 at file common.c, line 4178 | Error description:
no .blocklog file at '/media/usbExternalVmBackup/ESXi_backup/data/.blocklog'
run ./xsibackup --repair '/media/usbExternalVmBackup/ESXi_backup'

So I opened an ssh session on the remote destination host and ran:

root@ubuntu-vm-esxi:/media/usbExternalVmBackup/ESXi_backup# xsibackup --repair /media/usbExternalVmBackup/ESXi_backup

And I got the following error:
Sorting progress  0%sort: option requires an argument -- 'T'
Try 'sort --help' for more information.

Is this a known bug?
Thanks for your help,
Kind regards,
Alberto

admin

Administrator

Registered: 2017-04-21

Posts: 2,055

Re: Sorting progress error when repairing

If you interrupt a backup via Ctrl+C you will have a partially written backup repository. If you do so on the first backup attempt, you will most likely not even get to have a .blocklog file that you can repair.

Repairing a repo basically consists in accounting for all existing blocks and making sure that the .blocklog manifest file includes them all, so that when you run some posterior backup you can take advantage of that seeded blocks and you don't have to copy them again. Still, having to run --repair is a last resource action. You shouldn't need to do so. And if that was the case, you could only trust backups made after running that command.

It will always be more reasonable to just re-sync all data that to run --repair, as you will make sure all your data is consistent and you are not wasting storage space will old stall blocks. Only if you have a relatively narrowband link and resyncing is not possible you should choose --repair over creating a new repo.

There are different versions of the sort binary, which is still a dependency to some analysis arguments like --repair (we'll remove those dependencies in the next versions). Not all of them incorporate the -T argument. You may be using a Linux distro that has a non compatible sort binary.

Should that be the case, you will find a sort compatible binary inside the /bin folder in the installation root. That binary should be widely compatible with most Linux distros, thus you can simply replace your native sort implementation by the one in the /bin folder.

We recommend that you use CentOS 7/8 and Rocky Linux 8 (the latter preferably over CentOS 8). You can off course use any distro that you want, still if you follow our advice you will save some time in solving problems that we have already solved for you.

aavanzi1976

Member

Registered: 2022-03-17

Posts: 2

Re: Sorting progress error when repairing

Hello,

thanks for your kind and detailed reply, it makes a lot of sense.
I'll proceed that way.

Kind regards,
Alberto