Re: Tarsnap failing to make backups

[Graham Percival <gperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 04:27:18PM -0400, Michael Jung wrote:
> Tarsnap runs as "root" via cron although it still fails if I run in
> manually.

Do you mean that Tarsnap "attempts to run as root via cron (but fails)", or
"it successfully runs as root via cron"?

Occasionally somebody will get confused between running tarsnap as root vs.
with a regular account.  If your user has a ~/.tarsnaprc which points to an
old cache directory (which you might have used while initially
testing/configuring tarsnap), that would explain the discrepancy.

Or conversely, your user account might have a working ~/.tarsnaprc which
overrides settings from /usr/local/etc/tarsnap.conf; in that case, I would
expect commands run by your user to work but commands run by root to fail.

> Is there any debugging that can be turned on to get a better idea of whats
> going on?

Not off the top of my head in 1.0.39.  --noisy-warnings will complain about
network issues, and -v will produce verbose output about each file that it's
writing.  I don't think that either flag will help with fsck-related issues,
though.

There's a --dump-config flag in the unreleased git master (which will become
1.0.40 in the future), which would help to debug the "is tarsnap reading from
a config file I didn't realize?" problem.


If this email about "user account vs. root account" doesn't spark a solution,
I can create a new git branch which adds extra debug ouput related to fsck.

Cheers,
- Graham