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Date:      Mon, 11 May 2015 18:56:15 +0200
From:      Gabor Pali <pgj@FreeBSD.org>
To:        freebsd-fs@freebsd.org
Subject:   mksnap_ffs: Cannot create snapshot: File too large
Message-ID:  <CAHnG2CzeimP=Ay-JpTomEE_YJmBNYJdharbMiNrGT8=EWAzhDQ@mail.gmail.com>

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[Please, cc me in your replies as I am not subscribed to this list.  Thanks!]

Folks,

Recently, I started to use the snapshot feature of UFS, but I have
been experiencing some oddities with it that puzzles me.

I have a FreeBSD/amd64 10.1-RELEASE system (on a Hyper-V-managed VM),
and I have a relatively small, about 8 GB of size, partition with
UFS2, SU enabled where I want to take snapshots.  It is mounted fine
and works fine, but sometimes (quite at random), when the
mksnap_ffs(8) utility is invoked, it gives the following error message
(and creates an empty snapshot file, without the "snapshot" system
flag set).

# mount | fgrep /mnt/foo
/dev/da2a on /mnt/foo (ufs, local, noatime, soft-updates)
/mnt/foo on /some/other/directory (nullfs, local)
/mnt/foo on /yet/another/directory (nullfs, local, read-only)
# cd /mnt/foo
# /sbin/mksnap_ffs .snapshot
mksnap_ffs: Cannot create snapshot .snapshot: File too large

In the meantime, I see the following messages in dmesg(8):

bad block 3327649050063220270, ino 263776
pid 60313 (mksnap_ffs), uid 0 inumber 263776 on /mnt/foo: bad block

While sometimes, the very same command on the very same file system
works as expected.  Could this be due to the additional nullfs(5)
mounts?  What does the "bad block" refer to?

By the way, I also observed that once the snapshot is created
successfully, its date still keeps changing.  What does that mean?  I
did not find any information about that neither in the respective man
page nor in the Handbook.

It may be also related that I remove the snapshot file (via rm(1)) and
recreate it under the same name (with mksnap_ffs(8)) in 30-minute
intervals (from a cron(8)), that is when I use the updated snapshots
to do a backup from the file system.

Comments, hints, and ideas are welcome.



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