Backintime stopped working on Leap 15.3 - only for me?

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1

Hi all,

I’m using Backintime for a very long time now, nearly a decade. Rock solid, tested restoring files and folders a couple of times.
Wanted to make my first backup after zypper dup to 15.3, fails (reproducible) somewhere at the end of the snapshot. Reported here https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1188115 and here https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/1177
My question: I’m the only one affected? Or same for others? Who is using Backintime on Leap 15.3?
I’m a little nervous without backups, currently :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Michael

2

THANKS to Tejas Guruswamy (https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1188115#c3) !!!

Summarized, for all who are liking and using Backintime:

  • Backintime 1.2.1 on TW and Leap 15.3 stores temp. snapshot runtime data, e.g. logfile, below ~/.local/share/backintime
  • Backintime 1.1.24 and earlier on Leap 15.2 stored this somewhere else, no issue
  • As a result, ~/.local/share/backintime folder MUST be added to Backintime’s EXCLUDE list if you want to INCLUDE $HOME (~) to snapshots
3

I’m not using that software, so it does not affect me. However, I would like to thank you for reporting this – both the bug report and the forum post.

4

I support this.

But I find it strange that the product, knowing where it will write it’s log, doesn’t implicitly add it to it’s exclude list. Maybe together with a remark in the log or elsewhere.

5

I agree. However, perhaps this will be fixed in a future release.

6

I am using backintime with leap 15.3 with no issues. Have been using this for probably 10 years. It even restores a single file, a directorory, or more. So many other backups do a backup but no one ever tests their restorability which is lacking in many. Only comment is that it does not do incremental backups as well as advertised. I have lots of disk space and don’t keep many backups so this is no issue.

Just did update to 1.2.1 No problem.

Add /run/* to the exclude list to avoid backing up your backups from an external drive. I run it as root all the time. Restores to /home get ownerships properly treated.

tom kosvic

7

I use backintime also for years and have no problems.

8

Hi Tom,

why no incremental backups? Exactly this is the main reason why I’m it using for years now? Are you maybe using file systems without hard links? I started years ago with snapshotting to an usb hdd with NTFS, and this was a performance nightmare. Reformatted to ext4, voila, solved.

9

Kindly a remark to all “no problems” replies: My issue happens only if you include your home dir (~) recursively in your snapshots, as now, starting from Leap 15.3 / backintime 1.2.1, backintime started to store it’s intermediate log file to folder ~/.local/share/backintime. This intermediate log file will be moved to the snapshot’s root dir at the backup location.

10

In reference to others prev comments:

~/.local/share/backintime/takesnapshot_log is only 2.5k file on my machine so I don’t worry about it.

I do not know what is meant about filesystems without hard links with reference to incremental backups. Please amplify. Perhaps, I can get more incremental backups. But as I said, I have lots of storage on external disks and only keep 2 or 3 backups so doing full backups is not really an issue.

I too have ext for all partitions. btrfs seemed like more potential problems than it’s benefits.

tom kosvic