How to clean out a missing object?

[Frost]

When I try to run 'bup gc', it stops with this a short way in:

found 16491663 objects
bup: missing object '5d12a3253ec83bdcad51c360947a8aa896175651'

I don't really mind that there's a missing object, I'm about to run another backup anyway so it can just pull the latest version from the filesystem. But I'm not sure how to remove it so bup can get on with cleaning up. How do you do that?

(Not sure whether a backup would fail with the same error; we're out of disk space on the backup volume so can't really check.)

-- Frost

[Rob Browning]

"'Frost' via bup-list" <bup-...@googlegroups.com> writes:

> I don't really mind that there's a missing object, I'm about to run
> another backup anyway so it can just pull the latest version from the
> filesystem. But I'm not sure how to remove it so bup can get on with
> cleaning up. How do you do that?
>
> (Not sure whether a backup would fail with the same error; we're out
> of disk space on the backup volume so can't really check.)

Hmm, so that shouldn't be possible. Or rather, if bup's the only thing
that's been messing with the repo, then that probably indicates a bug
somewhere (if someone manually deleted a packfile on the other hand,
that could explain it).

And how serious this is depends on what that object refers to, which we
can probably find out (i.e. maybe via bup gc "-v" or "-vv". In any
case, first I'd recomment that you treat that repo with suspicion and
make sure you have (or make) other copies of any really important data
until we resolve the problem.

You could also try some a restore (or restores) to see if you can find
one that doesn't need the missing object, and if so, then it should be
possible to eventually drop the broken ones one way or another.

If you don't have enough space, and if it's not too expensive (depends
on the save sizes vs your IO bandwidth), one way to test a restore
without actually restoring might be to use "bup join
SOME_SAVE_REF_OR_HASH > /dev/null" and wait.

Oh, and what version of bup are you running, and what filesystem type
hosts the repo?

Thanks
--
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org
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