Rsnapshot destination full – how to safely rerun

backuprsnapshot

I ran my Rsnapshot backup today but my external drive became full half-way through the incremental backup (I have about 20 incremental backups now).

rsync: write failed on "<path>": No space left on device (28)

I now have an hourly.0 directory which I assume contains an incomplete incremental backup. How do I recover from this situation without losing data, and redo the backup?

My initial thoughts are to:

  1. Delete hourly.0 (because it contains an incomplete incremental backup of data since hourly.1 ?)
  2. Free up space on the external drive or move the entire contents of my external drive to a larger drive
  3. Re-run Rsnapshot.

My biggest concern is that deleting hourly.0 will somehow confuse Rsnapshot and cause problems. But is this the right approach?

Best Answer

If you have the output of rsnapshot available, you can safely repeat the rsync command that it used. You do not (and should not) delete hourly.0 if you're going to do this.

For example, on one of my systems this is (almost) what gets run by rsnapshot, so this could be copied and pasted and rerun:

/usr/bin/rsync -avzS --delete --delete-excluded --numeric-ids --fake-super \
    --exclude-from=/usr/local/etc/rsnapshot/EXCLUDE-qnap.inc \
    --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh \
    --link-dest=/backup/Rsync/NewZealand/QNAP/Data/hourly.1/share/ \
    admin@10.11.12.13:/share/ \
    /backup/Rsync/NewZealand/QNAP/Data/hourly.0/share/
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