Re: how to handle "cached trailer is corrupt"?

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On 11/29/11 09:53, A. Lester Buck III wrote:
> I have been using tarsnap for a few months with a nightly backup.
> Recently I had the following in the nightly log:
> 
> tarsnap: Removing leading '/' from member names
> tarsnap: Warning: cached trailer is corrupt
> tarsnap: Error writing cached archive entry

Wow, it actually happened!  I remember thinking when I put that error
message in "I don't know why I'm bothering with this, nobody should
ever see it".

> Shortly after this, I realized that a few blocks on the 1.5TB disk had
> gone bad.

Yep, that would do it.

> But I am unclear how to clean up tarsnap's metadata to start archiving
> again.

You want to delete the "cache" file in your cache directory.  (Leave the
"directory" file alone; that's the file which gets reconstructed by fsck,
and it isn't related to the above error.)

> Maybe there should be a
> section of the man page that lists the possible error messages and what
> action to take?

If I tried to list every error which could be caused by running tarsnap on
failing hardware, the man page would be very very long... and honestly, I'd
rather that people write to the list or to me when something like this happens
since if it happened a lot it would tell me that there was a bug in tarsnap.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer, FreeBSD | freebsd.org | The power to serve
Founder / author, Tarsnap | tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid