Re: Rsnapshot will only run hourly

Hi Lee,

> [ ... without proper references due to the fact that i just signed up,
> but read your post at the online archive ... ]

> I manually try to run rsnapshot via:
> rsnapshot hourly (this works)
> rsnapshot monthly (doesn't work)
> rsnapshot weekly (doesn't work)
> 
> When I say it doesn't work, it doesn't create a monthly.0 or weekly.0  
> dir.. and it doesn't even appear to try to run rsync to connect to  
> the remote server in the logs

I just took rsnapshot for a test drive last week and i encountered the
same behaviour.

Set verbose to 4 in your configuration and run rsnapshot
{monthly,weekly} again. I assume you will see something similar to this

,----  $ rsnapshot weekly 
| echo 10774 > /var/run/rsnapshot.pid
| /backup/snapshots/weekly.3 not present (yet), nothing to delete
| /backup/snapshots/weekly.2 not present (yet), nothing to rotate
| /backup/snapshots/weekly.1 not present (yet), nothing to rotate
| /backup/snapshots/weekly.0 not present (yet), nothing to rotate
| /backup/snapshots/daily.6 not present (yet), nothing to copy
| rm -f /var/run/rsnapshot.pid
| /usr/bin/logger -i -p user.notice -t rsnapshot /usr/bin/rsnapshot weekly: \
|     completed successfully
`----

This means rsnapshot doesn't really take a backup when running for an
interval not being the smallest one but instead just copies it's data
from the oldest version of the next smallest interval. Sounds confusing?
See the online manual for more information.

,----  rsnapshot HOWTO, Section 4.3.7 
| It's also worth noting that the snapshots get .pulled up. from the
| smallest interval to the largest. In this example, the daily snapshots
| get pulled from the oldest hourly snapshot, not directly from the main
| filesystem.
`----

So, as long as you haven't run the hourly interval for at least 6 times,
rsnapshot won't do a "backup" at the daily interval. And if you happen
to omit the daily backups and jump straight from hourly to weekly, no
weekly backup is going to happen as long as the daily interval is still
defined as an intermediary interval.

Regards

- Sebastian

[1] http://rsnapshot.org/howto/1.2/rsnapshot-HOWTO.en.html

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