Sorry about the delay Martin, i have not needed to perform restores in the meantime and as you can imagine i wasnt too happy about the situation so i was content with knowing the date was being backed up at least, the restore is for another time.
I noticed in the client changelog: “Disable following symlinks by default when restoring via command line“, could that be related to this thread? I noticed all clients have auto-upgraded their client, good. I could still run some tests with the suggestions you made in June, if you want? I assume the behavior is still different when restoring via the webinterface vs the command line client? What i dont understand is that i have never seen the option to not follow symlinks during a restore via the web interface, where can i find that? Or maybe you meant to also change that default behavior (not a user interaction, but “under the hood”)? The whole problem this post is about feels like “symlinkception” hehe. Thanks ofcourse for your work and help, it is much appreciated. Let me know what tests i can run to help/confirm things.
(bit offtopic, bit related) Maybe you remember i also made a post about symlinks not always being followed when follow_symlinks was enabled? I ran into another issue where the modification timestamp on a lot of folders was changed on a client and now the backup server is transferring and comparing (and linking unchanged files) all the data, about 10TB!, which will take days. Its not a big issue, and the behavior is not so weird, i assume it comes from the fact i am not using snapshots on that client. So i had another reason to start using snapshots. Right now i am trying to figure out how to change a client to use (btrfs) snapshots for backups post-install, that is after the client was already installed with no option for snapshotting chosen during installation. What i found so far is that if i uninstall the client (uninstall_urbackup), then install the client again (this time with option 3), edit /etc/default/urbackupclient, then run urbackupclientctl set-settings –authkey “<client_id>“ –server-url “urbackup://yadayada” and restart the client daemon, initially the server complained that it was recognized as a new client with the same name, but as i was writing this down that changed and the client appears as normal on the webinterface. Comparing the snapper snapshots taken around the reinstallation of the client, i noticed a file “/usr/local/etc/urbackup/no_filesystem_snapshot“ was removed and “/usr/local/etc/urbackup/snapshot.cfg“ was created with in there references to the “btrfs_create_filesystem_snapshot” and “remove” scripts.
Could i simply make those changes on existing clients and assume btrfs snapshotting will be attempted in the future or do i need to uninstall and reinstall their clients? That would be really useful knowledge. Im yet to test the client to see if it works as expected, but ofcourse now with snapshots. I’ll be sure to update the other post with my findings. I was wondering if you could also check the links to the wiki and “other documentation”, i dont see a way to share/consult information at those places other than the admin manual and this forum at the moment. Cheers, Daan.