Updates of hackage-server and data loss

[Erik Hesselink]

On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 19:07, Duncan Coutts
<duncan.coutts at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 6 February 2012 15:22, Erik Hesselink <hesselink at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> We run hackage-server internally at Silk. Every time we update to a
>> new version, it is unable to read our old data. Is the acid-state
>> being versioned correctly? Or is this expected behavior? It is very
>> annoying for us. If this is expected, is there a way to work around
>> it?
>
> Our approach to versioning is not via acid-state by by a database
> backup/restore method. We export all canonical data to a tarball of
> text and other standard format files. The reason we do this is because
> we don't trust that the binary data format is sufficient for long term
> preservation of all the data. Because we are using dump/restore, we
> make no attempt to use the acid-state versioning scheme (it's
> plausible we might do so in future as an extra, but probably not until
> there are actual releases).
>
> The backu[/restore is done via the commands 'hackage-server backup'
> and 'hackage-server restore'. It is also possible to generate backups
> while the server is running by sending a USR1 signal (kill -USR1
> $the_pid).
>
> Note also that testing of the backup/restore method is not quite
> complete, but the testing framework for it is in place I think.

I actually tried the backup at some point, and got the following output:

hackage-server: Initializing happstack-state...
hackage-server: Server data loaded into memory
hackage-server: Preparing export tarball
hackage-server: Saving export tarball
hackage-server: Shutting down...
hackage-server: /home/erik/state/: inappropriate type

This was with the old code though, I haven't tried with the new code yet.

I just tried sending the signal to the running process, and got:

hackage-server: Writing checkpoint...
hackage-server: Done

There's no backup to be found anywhere, though. Where should it create
the backup?

Erik