[PLUG] When mounted doesn't mean mounted

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:49:06 -0700
Paul Mullen <pm at nellump.net> dijo:

> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 09:57:54AM -0700, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> > The easiest way to differentiate a directory that will be used for a
> > mount point, and a mounted partition on that directory, is to make
> > the substructure different, and rely on that.  For example, if the
> 
> It's even easier than that. Set the ownership and permissions on your
> mount point such that it's writable only by root. Put an entry in
> fstab so that the backup file system is user-mountable. When the
> backup file system is mounted, the mount point will assume the
> ownership and permissions of the mounted file system's root. Nothing
> mounted, nothing written (not by a mere user, at least).

The problem is, as Keith suspected, that rdiff-backup (or its GUI,
pybackpack), helpfully creates folders if it doesn't see them. Worse,
if the folder already exists it assumes I wouldn't want to overwrite
it, and creates a copy of the folder someplace else. 

Furthermore, if I run rdiff-backup (via the GUI) as jjj it throws up
massive error messages about files it doesn't have permission to copy.
This is when I use it for a full system backup. If I just back up ~/ I
get only one error message - the .gvfs file. Apparently it takes god
powers to do anything with .gvfs, because even root can't touch it. I
haven't figure that one out yet.

I don't want to get into how I do my backups because that argument has
already been discussed at length here in the past. Suffice it to say
that some people disagree with me, and we probably always will
disagree. Linux is big enough for us all to be happy.

However, at this point I am considering tossing rdiff-backup in the
bin. Not only does it seem to create folders when and where it should
not, but somehow when it filled my disk it nuked my Nautilus bookmarks
file, and reset half of my Gnome settings. Moreover, the system is
unusable when it is running because it takes every ounce of CPU power.
I could live with the latter problem, but the bugs are just
unacceptable.