Public bug reported:
So, I had an absolute horror of a time which badly broke my system in a
number of ways. Tracing things back it appears to originate with
Timeshift. Although I can't readily say which version because things
were that broken (I might be able to dig it up if essential).
The crux of it seems to be that timeshift seeks to mount a filesystem to
perform backups to, even if it is corrupted. This causes all sorts of
"fun things" to happen.
To which I have the following observations/suggestions:
- Timeshift should not mount and attempt to back up to corrupted
filesystems.
- Timeshift should ensure that its behaviour does not cause updatedb to be
run on the filesystem it has mounted. Perhaps by a filter being added to
updatedb, I don't know?
- Because I think mounting filesystems silently like that is the
unintuitive behaviour that lead to it. Updatedb is just doing what it says on
the tin.
/var/log/kern.log:Jan 10 20:47:09 marius kernel: [ 363.671082] EXT4-fs error
(device dm-4): ext4_lookup:1703: inode #7086099: comm updatedb.mlocat: deleted
inode referenced: 7119161
/var/log/kern.log.1:Jan 9 14:00:02 marius kernel: [ 379.513273] EXT4-fs error
(device dm-4): ext4_lookup:1703: inode #5505033: comm timeshift: deleted inode
referenced: 9178184
- Also, use of corrupted filesystems exacerbates corruption, furthermore (I
think?) the use of hard links by timeshift for space saving makes the fsck
problems to fix it again exponentially worse due to 'duplicate reference'
errors etc.
And the following indirectly related suggestions for documentation etc:
- Shouldn't documentation be abundandly clear timeshift WILL NOT guard
against hardware failures? (RTFM?).
- Lack of NFS support put me in this situation. Understandable but what
remote protocols (if any) Will work? iSCSI? Some documentation on that would be
good?
- An rsync type backup to a subdirectory should not preclude the partition
from being used for anything else, but timeshift's behaviour appears to
indicate it *does* preclude that?
- I find timeshift's (IIRC) default exclusion of /home frankly bizarre and
unintuitive? Perhaps there should be an install-time dialogue to ask if you
want this to happen?
PS. Apologies this is a bit rough and ready (and indeed probably
warrants multiple bugs), but I wanted to finally get this bug filed
today as I'd been dealing with the partition that was victim to this
issue again (thankfully the fsck didn't take as long as I feared to get
through manually, but data loss is still a possibility, TBC). As you can
tell from the timestamps below it's already taken me a long time to get
to it, and I'm only doing it now way past bed time when already tired.
** Affects: timeshift (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1953409
Title:
Timeshift mounts unclean partitions to back up onto? And observations.
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