Recently my backup process is throwing this error:
rsync: read errors mapping "/home/minecraft/server/bukkit/nether/DIM-1/region/r.2.-1.mca": Input/output error (5)
I cannot copy the file somewhere else. I know it’s not an access rights issue. Unfortunately, I am not 100% sure what to do best. There are 2 processes available that I know of:
- restart the server (the whole machine) and schedule a disk check on startup. This means a longer downtime. Last time I suspected HD errors (not sure anymore what that was) and tried to do that, the machine would not start up by itself and I had to wait for tech support to go in and restart it.
- Try to just delete the file and either restore the area from backup or regenerate the area from scratch. The issue with this is that in case there is an issue with the harddisk, we would not know.
Any one with more linux troubleshooting experience who can help how to best approach this?
I’ll ask around with the more seasoned linux sysadmins when I get to work in an hour or so. :)
I would not call myself seasoned but I have some basic linux administration knowledge.
The first and most important advice with a harddisk you suspect to be faulty is to cease any write operations immediately, as any further modification may damage more data.
That is mounting the disk with a ro flag.
Beside all these problems – the important questions is – how old is your last backup?
Last but not least – if everything else fails: The mca file format is block based – so even if some sectors on your hdd are unreadable you can use either dd or a wrapper to rescue the rest of the file and save as many chunks of the mca file as possible.