Back In Time

Files with colons cause errors

Asked by Martin Kamleithner

I use BIT in SSH encrypted mode to backup my ext4 filesystem to another ext4 filesystem over the network.
However, files with colons causes errors:

### This log has been decoded with automatic search pattern
### If some paths are not decoded you can manually decode them with:
### 'backintime --quiet --profile Main profile --decode <path>'

========== Take snapshot (profile 1): Thu 12 Feb 2015 06:26:27 PM ==========

[E] Error: rsync: readlink_stat("/tmp/backintime/root/mnt/9AC0531D/mountpoint/home/mkamleithner/.config/teamviewer10/dosdevices/z:") failed: Invalid argument (22)

z: is a symlink to / , created by wine, but I believe this is not relevant. I did not activate any special handling for (unsafe) symlinks.

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Germar
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This question was originally filed as bug #1421441.

Revision history for this message
Germar (germar) said : 		#1

Rsync can't handle colons (not sure why).
BackInTime < 1.1.0 wasn't able to exclude colon for historical reasons.
So you could either exclude 'dosdevices' or update to current BackInTime version 1.1.2 and exclude 'z:'. No matter which on you exclude wine will recreate them if they are lost after restore.

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Martin Kamleithner (martinkamleithner) said : 		#2

According to http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/11581/rsync-colon-in-file-names and http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/rsync-scp-file-name-with-colon-punctuation-in-it/ , it is possible to rsync files with colons if the colons are escaped with a '\'.

It would be a nice feature to make this work.
Excluding the folders works as well, but it's a bit tedious because it has to be done for multiple programs that use wine.

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Best Germar (germar) said : 		#3

Sorry, I was wrong. Rsync can handle colons just fine and your links above are only to handle colons in source and destination path. This doesn't matter if there is a file with colons inside a subfolder of source.

But this error is caused by 'encfs --reverse' with a symlink pointing to / no matter if there is a colon or not. I was able to reproduce this even with 'ls'.

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Martin Kamleithner (martinkamleithner) said : 		#4

Ok, so I guess there is not much BIT can do about this.
It is no problem anyway after the affected folders are excluded.

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Martin Kamleithner (martinkamleithner) said : 		#5

Thanks Germar, that solved my question.

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Germar (germar) said : 		#6

Not sure yet, if I can do anything about this. I'll look further into this and maybe create a bugreport on encfs.