Appendix F – BRU Execution Log

Every time BRU is executed, it writes a message to an execution log. The default log file is

/Library/Application Support/ArGest Backup/log/bruexeclog.

Each entry in the execution log is a single line that contains the following information:

date and time

process ID of the BRU task

ID of the user who started BRU

message number

message text

A line is written to the execution log when BRU is started and when BRU terminates. A line is also written to the log for each error or warning message. The execution log is designed to help you monitor your backups. Since it maintains a record of every time BRU was executed, you can tell how long it took to do a backup. Since it records all warnings and error messages, it is also useful for trouble-shooting. If a problem occurs while using BRU, the log will contain a record of what happened.

You can change the location of the execution log by setting the BRUEXECLOG environment variable. You should do this only if the default location is not satisfactory (because of limited space in that filesystem, for example).

The following two command lines entered in your currently active Terminal will temporarily change the location of the execution log to /etc/newbrulog.

BRUEXECLOG=/etc/newbrulog
export BRUEXECLOG

The log file should not take up much disk space, since most users do not execute BRU more than once or twice a day. Even a year’s worth of log entries should take less than 100K bytes of space. We do not recommend it, but you can disable the execution log by setting BRUEXECLOG to a null string (i.e., BRUEXECLOG=””).

NOTE: If you have created a root and a boot floppy for crash recovery, you may need to set BRUEXECLOG=/dev/null. BRU will attempt to write to or create a BRUEXECLOG file whenever you run any of the BRU commands. This can cause you a problem if you do not have room on the boot device to create and append to the file.

Execution logging will also be disabled if BRU is renamed (or a link is created) and executed as Bru (with a capital B).

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are having difficulties with BRU, please save the information in the execution log file. This will help BRU Technical Support to identify and solve your specific problem.

BRU Execution Summary
If BRU’s verbosity is specified as -vvvv or greater, an execution summary will be printed when BRU completes execution. If you wish to print the execution summary only, without listing all the files, the -V (capital V) option should be specified.

Here’s a typical execution summary:

**** bru: execution summary ****
Started: Mon Feb 27 12:59:05 1995
Completed: Mon Feb 27 13:01:38 1995
Archive id: 2f522f092adb
Messages: 0 warnings, 0 errors
Archive I/O: 3690 blocks (7380Kb) written
Archive I/O: 3690 blocks (7380Kb) read
Files written: 20 files (20 regular, 0 other)
Files read: 20 files (20 regular, 0 other)
Files in headers: 2
Write errors: 0 soft, 0 hard
Read errors: 0 soft, 0 hard
Checksum errors: 0
Min Compression: 41%
Avg Compression: 71%
Max Compression: 76%
Max Compressed Size: 2424613 bytes
Compression Overflows: 2
Difference count: 0

The fields are defined below:

Started: Date and time the process started.

Completed: Date and Time the process completed.

Archive id: A unique 12-character archive identifier.

Messages: A count of the total number of warning and error messages.

Archive I/O: Number of BRU blocks (2Kb) written to the archive device. This should be zero if you are just reading (extracting files or inspecting) a tape

Archive I/O: Number of BRU blocks (2Kb) read from the archive device. This should be zero if you are only writing to a tape (with no AUTOSCAN or inspection).

Files written: Number and type of files written to the archive. This should be zero if you are just reading a tape.

Files read: Number and type of files read from the archive device. This will be zero if you are just writing to a tape.

Files in headers: Number of small files stored in header.

Write errors: Number of errors counted when writing to the archive device. A ”soft” error indicates a problem detected by BRU. A “hard” error is a hardware error reported by UNIX that caused BRU to issue an error message.

Read errors: Number of errors counted when reading from the archive device.

Checksum errors: Total number of checksum errors detected when BRU was reading the archive (in AUTOSCAN, extract or inspection modes).

Min Compression: Minimum percent of compression for a file

Avg Compression: The average compression of all files in the current archive.

Max Compression: Maximum compression percentage.

Max Compressed Size: largest file compressed.

Compression Overflows: Number of files that were too large for the compression buffer (ZBUFSIZE).

Difference count: Total number of files that were different when the -d option was used.