[tahoe-dev] tahoe backup fails on big directories

[Marco Tedaldi]

Hello everyone

While using tahoe backup to make a backup of my digital pictures I came 
across a strange behavior.

I'm using tahoe 1.8.3

When trying to upload directories with subdirectories and a lot of files 
in them, thaoe fails with happiness errors.

It tells me something like: Want to upload to 12 server so data can be 
recovered from 7 servers but could only upload to 11 servers.

This despite the fact that there are 18 server up and accepting shares.
Restarting the job sometimes helped.
Starting another job always worked
Restarting my local tahoe node always helped

So I get the impression that tahoe initially selects a set of "total 
servers" from all the servers when "tahoe backup" is started. But than 
it seems to stick with these servers. If some of these selected servers 
fail to accept shares, tahoe does not seem to select other servers 
instead (except if tahoe node is restarted)

If total server is way higher than happy, the problem does not occur 
that often.
If total = happy the problem occurs very often!


I have been able to work around that problem by setting total servers a 
bit higher than happy and uploading data in smaller chunks (so a 
directory does not take more than a day or two to finish).


Is this like tahoe works?
Is it a bug?

best regards

Marco