Rubin Shrestha
Rubin Shrestha
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Why does afio create a broken symlink and then stop unpacking?

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I’ve got a serious issue with afio Version 2.5.2 dated 30 Nov 2018 on Ubuntu 24.04.4: When trying to unpack a huge (> 1.1 TB) archive…

mixtile@blade3n4:/$ sudo afio -iZ /media/mixtile/F2545FBE545F83EF/20260502_1808.afio &

…I get such a directory:

mixtile@blade3n4:/bak$ ls -al
total 8
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 May  4 15:39 .
drwxr-xr-x 26 root root 4096 May  4 15:40 ..
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root    5 May  4 15:39 home -> Xhome

But: Xhome has never existed! The /bak directory looks like this on the original machine (where I made the archive):

╭─root@valen ~  
╰─➤  ls -al /bak
insgesamt 228
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root     82 30. Jul 2023  .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root    176 29. Jul 2023  ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     10 29. Jul 2023  export -> /srv/share
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      5 28. Jul 2023  home -> /home
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      9 29. Jul 2023  info -> /srv/info
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  81906 30. Jul 2023  restore2.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 132895 29. Jul 2023  restore.log
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      5 29. Jul 2023  root -> /root

…and on the target system, I declared /bak as a symlink to /var/data, where the files ultimately belong to. This link was apparently overwritten by afio.

The symlinks lead to folders, whose content is to be backed up.

Almost three years ago, I had to make a restore of an archive made with the same afio, which did work. But this time, when unpacking the archive, stderr was filled with such messages I don’t understand:

afio: "/media/mixtile/F2545FBE545F83EF/20260502_1808.afio" [offset 7569m+253k+333]: Bad binary pathname length
afio: "/media/mixtile/F2545FBE545F83EF/20260502_1808.afio" [offset 7569m+274k+467]: Bad swapped pathname length
afio: "/media/mixtile/F2545FBE545F83EF/20260502_1808.afio" [offset 7569m+290k+801]: Apparently resynchronized
afio: "@P": Continuing

Tests with a slightly older archive led to the same issues. This is the version used on my “old” system: Version 2.5.1 dated 05 Feb 2012

So knowing that:

  • Where does the broken symlink leading to Xhome come from?
  • Does this pseudo-link make an end to the unpacking of the archive?
  • Is my archive broken?

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