The daily system backups had failed for several days so it was time to investigate and I found that the time of death was after upgrading squeeze to wheezy.
Pdumpfs is useful because each day's new backup consists of hard links to all previous files plus any new files that have been written since the previous backup. After the upgrade, pdumpfs exits with errors related to ruby libraries and it's game over. To recover files, one mounts the backup medium, cd's to the year/month/day/home/user/files and simply copies them wherever they need to be. It's simple and most important, one can stick a suitably-scized thumb drive in to a usb port and forget about it until it is needed. Such programs as dump, restore and rsync are fine but need more media and attention for use as backups. The description of pdumpfs describes it's backup strategy as similar to something called plan9. All constructive suggestions are greatly appreciated. Martin McCormick -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150806181356.IDCD8725.txofep02.suddenlink.net@localhost