Recently, one of my BackupPC clients running CentOS failed to backup, with the contents of the host log being:
2015-06-10 01:40:10 incr backup started back to 2015-05-16 08:56:42 (backup #600) for directory /
2015-06-10 21:40:18 Aborting backup up after signal ALRM
2015-06-10 21:40:18 Got fatal error during xfer (fileListReceive failed)
...and the last bad XferLOG containing:
fileListReceive() failed
This happened a couple of times in a row, and the interval between the start
time of the backup and the failure was consistently 20 hours. While checking,
I noticed that an rsync process started on the client by BackupPC was running
for about a week. I did an strace -p <PID> on the process ID of rsync and
noticed that it was trying to stat an old NFS export, mounted from a server
that no longer exists.
Although there are other ways to fix this, it was OK for this host to be rebooted at the time, problem solved.