On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 04:53:09PM -0500, Peter King wrote:
I managed to locate two partial versions of the missing file, from which I could reconstruct most of it. Still no idea about what went wrong, but given that the partial versions decrypted without problem, my guess is a disk error or something of the sort that corrupted the encrypted file, which was then propagated to all my backups.
Moral of the Story (one moral among many): Keep static time-stamped backups as well as current redundant copies. Will implement a scheme to do so this week, a better New Year's resolution than most!
Thanks to all who offered suggestions.
I suppose things like rsnapshot which keeps copies with hardlinks to save space really ought to be on a good filesystem. By default rsync doesn't compare files if the size and timstamp matches, which of course means rsnapshot could happily think you have a good copy of a file but that has in fact gotten corrupt because the underlying disk is failing. Making it always do a read compare would make it much slower, so having the filesystem maintain the reduncancy and checksums does seem more efficient. Getting reliable storage is getting complicated. Just remember not to yell at your disks though. They don't like that. :) -- Len Sorensen