Recovering from an Oops! Backup rollback error

By David
/
First published 23rd February 2016 (Last Modified 9th January 2021)

After a problem with coretemp that hard crashed my CPU (at least that's what the symptom looked it), on the subsequent reboot, Oops! Backup reported that it attempted to rollback the backup that was in progress at the time. Sadly the rollback failed and left sufficient damage to prevent backups from proceeding. To be fair to Oops! Backup, to fully prevent this would require write-ahead buffering to be disabled (it's enabled by default on windows systems as for most consumer system the lost of performance is considered too expensive.

I recovered from the problem with the aid of a luckily quite recent 2nd backup. My steps were:

  1. Exit the existing Oops! Backup instance
  2. Move the existing backup to a safer place (I should have used the windows "robocopy" command from the beginning rather than the GUI. Robocopy can cope with long path names and deep directory structures and is faster than the GUI.
  3. Copy the 2nd backup to where the existing backup had been
  4. Start Oops! Backup and run a backup. This correctly recognised that plenty of files needed to be backed up.

This does mean that I've lost a couple of days of history - but, for me, the only ones that mattered are the changes to my wordpress plugins and those are already under change management via fossil.