DB Corruption

James Vasile james at hackervisions.org
Thu Feb 17 05:48:53 PST 2011


This email is a gentle reminder to back up your tags unless they are
100% mechanically generated.

Last night, while testing some scripts that do a bunch of "notmuch new",
"notmuch tag" and "notmuch search" commands, I suddenly started getting
an error:

"A Xapian exception occurred opening database: Db block overwritten -
are there multiple writers?"

I hopped over to #notmuch and asked for help. ojwb asked for a directory
listing of my xapian directory and informed me my basA and baseB files
were missing.  I ended up restoring from a recent dump of the db.

I'm not sure how this happend (I only interact with that directory via
notmuch), but I suppose if it happened to me it could happen to you.  So
backup those tags.

-J


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