Back up failed in /lost+found

[Anoop Sivan]

Hi Team
We have an back-up issue with one of our server, saying back from /lost +found is failed.We check the root file system and no error's found.
=============================================
We are unable to backup the /lost+found file located in the root FS. Please check the status of this file and if it needs to be recraeated:

* : cannot stat /lost+found/#0055260: I/O error
* : cannot stat /lost+found/#0061090: I/O error
* : Error 0 while saving /lost+found/#0055260
* : Error 0 while saving /lost+found/#0061090
==============================================
root@yrgert234:/root > cd /lost+found
root@yrgert234:/lost+found > ls -l
total 23996
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 1305 Sep 21 2007 #0046576
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 1459 Oct 23 2007 #0046577
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 88744 Oct 3 2008 #0054143
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 88648 Aug 16 2007 #0055260
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 80476 Jun 27 2007 #0060021
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 88744 Mar 27 2009 #0061090
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 328 Sep 19 2007 #0090507
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 302 Jun 18 2007 #0090553
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 646 Jun 18 2007 #0090554
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 340 Oct 23 2007 #0090587
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 23512 Feb 18 2009 #0090805

[Kapil Jha]

lost+found directory is a directory which holds the missing inodes information/file, if you have smthing in this directory that means there was/is some problem with your file system.

You can get the files using dd command.
or read them with
more \#number

BR,
Kapil+

[S.N.S]

Is it then better to just exclude that dir?

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

The lost+found directory is a temporary location used to recover lost files. However, 90% of these files are usually temporary and don't need to be recovered. The other problem is that there is no way to know what the original name of the file was. Most of these lost inodes are cause by system crashes while the diectory is busy, so most sysadmins ignore the directory contents. So you can exclude lost+found, or much simpler, remove all the files. Note that the # will be a problem in the shell -- escape the # with quotes or backslash:

rm "/lost+found/#0090553"
rm /lost+found/\#0090554

[Anoop Sivan]

Hi Teams

Thanks for all your quick reply....

We closed the issue.We run the fsck on root filesystem.Now we received confirmation from back-up team saying that they can successfully run the back-up.

[Anoop Sivan]

closing the thread.

[Dennis Handly]

>Bill: escape the # with quotes or backslash:
rm "/lost+found/#0090553"
rm /lost+found/\#0090554

None of these cases need escaping since there is no whitespace before the "#".