Re: tarsnap UTF-8 error; Single Archive Accounting

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On 02/24/12 18:20, james@glight.ca wrote:
> 2 questions - my sincere apologies if I missed these anywhere in the documentation:
> 
> 1) UTF-8 Path translation error during backup job:
> tarsnap: ./etc/ssl/certs/AC_Raíz_Certicámara_S.A..pem: Can't translate
> pathname './etc/ssl/certs/AC_Raíz_Certicámara_S.A..pem' to UTF-8Can't
> translate linkpath
> '../../../usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/AC_Raíz_Certicámara_S.A..crt' to
> UTF-8
> 
> How do I correct this?  If I can't correct it, how do I filter these types of
> files from the backup so that they do not cause and error on exit?

You can probably ignore it.  That warning message is telling you (or trying to
tell you -- it isn't very clear!) that the path can't be translated to UTF-8 and
is instead being stored "raw".  Depending on how your OS handles non-ASCII paths
and what locale settings you're using, there's a slight chance that if you
restore this file onto a differently-configured system, the non-ASCII characters
in the path will be mangled.

If you restore onto the *same* system (or an identically-configured system) then
everything will work fine; and even in the paths-get-mangled case you'll still
get the file data back.

> 2) How do I show the stats of a single archive?  Specifically, how much unique
> data does that archive?  For the purposes of determining how much reoccuring
> cost would be saved if that archive was deleted?

# tarsnap --print-stats -f archivename
will print something of the form
                                            Total size  Compressed size
     All archives                         104491640436      51510524844
       (unique data)                       14830618089       7733620463
     archivename                             808723344        289077325
     New data                                 17858641          5658308
which means that if you delete <archivename>, 5658308 bytes will be
deleted from the server (since you're billed for compressed deduplicated
storage).

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