System freeze on Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) with ext4

If you set snapshots directory on a ext4 partition the system may freeze.

It seems to be a problem in ext4 on Ubuntu:

Solution (thanks to mahikeulbody)

You need to  set ‘nodelalloc’ option for each ext4 partition it accesses into fstab file .

2 Responses to “System freeze on Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) with ext4”

  1. blurpo  on December 25th, 2009

    It doesn’t help for me. I have Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit, ext4 filesystem mounted with the nodelalloc option.

    A backup job start with the command:
    > backintime -b
    will hang with the following stacktrace:

    INFO: Save permissions
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “/usr/share/backintime/common/backintime.py”, line 174, in
    start_app()
    File “/usr/share/backintime/common/backintime.py”, line 86, in start_app
    take_snapshot( cfg, True )
    File “/usr/share/backintime/common/backintime.py”, line 42, in take_snapshot
    snapshots.Snapshots( cfg ).take_snapshot( force )
    File “/usr/share/backintime/common/snapshots.py”, line 424, in take_snapshot
    ret_val = self._take_snapshot( snapshot_id, now, include_folders, ignore_folders, dict, force )
    File “/usr/share/backintime/common/snapshots.py”, line 724, in _take_snapshot
    fileinfo.close()
    IOError: [Errno 5] Input/output error

    This was the same before I mounted with nodelalloc.

    Note that it is the filesystem that I’m backing up that is ext4. The filesystem I’m writing the backup to, is a remote disk on a NAS mounted using FTP, using curlftpfs. (The filesystem of the remote disk is xfs, but I doubt that that’s relevant?)

  2. faber  on May 12th, 2010

    I’m currently backin up into an external ext4 partition with backintime 0.9.26 and ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 and I hopefully have no problems :)