FileChanged

From RdiffBackupWiki

(Text deleted).. see an error like this:-

UpdateError <file> File changed from regular file before signature

It means that the file in the backup does not match what rdiff-backup is expecting to find there. Often it means that the file in the backup has been deleted. There are two possible ways to fix this.

The first (simplest) way to try is to replace the file(s) that are missing from the backup by manually copying from the source.

If you don't have a copy of the file anywhere else, then hopefully the file is not important, but you almost certainly want to stop the error message appearing every time you backup forevermore. To do this, you need to edit the metadata as follows.

Go into the "rdiff-backup-data" directory and find the most recent "file_statistics" and "mirror_metadata" gzipped files. Uncompress them using 'gunzip'.

In the "file_statistics" file, simply find the line(s) which refer to the offending file(s) and delete them. e.g. for the file "davro/bugtrack/admin/configure.php" you'd remove a line like this:-

davro/bugtrack/admin/configure.php 0 1803 1803 NA

In the "mirror_metadata" file, each file is described by several lines of metadata. For each offending file, delete everything from the "File <filename>" until the next "File" line. e.g. if the file causing problems was "davro/bugtrack/admin/configure.php", you'd delete the group of lines like this from the mirror_metadata file:-

File davro/bugtrack/admin/configure.php
  Type reg
  Size 1803
  ModTime 1035230528
  Uid 503
  Gid 503
  Permissions 420

When all references to deleted files are removed, compress the two files again with gzip, and all should be well.

A Ruby script by Ned Konz that does all of this is at http://bike-nomad.com/ruby/fixRdiffBackupData.rb. Just run it with the name of the rdiff-backup-data directory to be repaired.