[PLUG] What are .lock files

Larry Brigman larry.brigman at gmail.com
Fri Apr 25 18:01:23 UTC 2008


On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 10:47 AM, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:27:53 -0700
>  "Larry Brigman" <larry.brigman at gmail.com> dijo:
>
>
>
>  > On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 11:54 PM, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
>  > > Every time I try to do a backup it stops when it hits a .lock file.
>  > >  This kills dead the idea of unattended backups. Using locate I find a
>  > >  dozen of them on my hard disk.
>  > >
>  > >  It takes only 15 minutes to complete a backup of ~/, but it's annoying
>  > >  to come back to the computer only to discover that the backup stopped
>  > >  halfway through when it hit a .lock file.
>  >
>  > If the .lock file exists, it there as a temporary file.  After a reboot, or
>  > worst case after a restore, these files are of no value.  They are of
>  > no value to the backup either.  Figure out a way to ignore the .lock files
>  > in your backup.
>
>  That's kind of what I figured a .lock file was.
>
>  I back up only sporadically because I don't create important stuff
>  every day. I just back up after I have done something that I want to be
>  sure I don't lose - which ends up averaging about once a week.
>  Sometimes it might be every day for several days in a row, then none
>  for a couple of weeks during which all I did was browse and read
>  e-mails. I also use my thumb drive for a quickie backup of new work.
>
>  Because of my simple needs I use Nautilus to drag ~/ on my laptop to a
>  folder on my desktop computer. That's where I run into the .lock
>  problem. Today I decided to try the cp command instead, but cp won't
>  copy directories unless I can figure out the command, and the man page
>  eludes my comprehension.
cp -r source_pattern destination

tar actually gives you more options.
>
>  Today I wanted to make a more thorough backup in anticipation of doing
>  an apt-get dist-upgrade to Hardy. I decided to try to rsync to an empty
>  folder on the desktop. It worked great for ~/, but when I tried other
>  folders I got a lot of errors - permission denied, even when I sudo'ed
>  it. From past experience, rsync is a pain. Lots of bugs, and horribly
>  complex. I've also used tar and dar, but I don't like my backups
>  compressed and everything all in one file. Disk space is cheap. I want
>  to be able to look at the folder where I backed stuff up to,
>  right-click and do Properties, and have it tell me that it has the same
>  exact number of files and the number of bytes is identical to the
>  original folder. Then I feel comfortable that it's all there. Plus, if
>  I accidentally delete a file I can just go grab it from the backup
>  folder without having to untar it or run a restore program. I like to
>  KISS.
>
>  I know there are scripts, but I don't understand them either, or how to
>  modify them to suit my needs.

Scripts are just something that you would normally type a command
prompt that you don't want to type over and over again because
it is long or complicated.  The only thing is to mark them executable.



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