#388 Partclone.log can get overwritten

[mirh]

Assume I'm cloning a disk with more partitions.
If partition 2 has some error its copy will be aborted and CZ will proceed to partition 3.
This ain't half bad.. except that when I get back to reading partclone.log to understand what happened, the one concerning partition 2 has long since been replaced.

[Steven Shiau]

Did you enable batch mode? Otherwise it should stop and wait for you to press enter to continue?

Steven

[mirh]

It will wait for me to press enter and continue, yes.
....
So maybe then I could even use some keyboard shortcut to switch terminal window, now that I think to it.
But that doesn't exactly seem intuitive or user-friendly.

[Steven Shiau]

In addition to /var/log/partclone.log, the log file /var/log/clonezilla.log contains every log file of each partition which partclone has run. You can check /var/log/clonezilla.log, too.

Steven

[mirh]

Mhh, you do have a solid point there (or at least I think, I didn't personally countercheck now).
Still.. I believe there is something that could be done here to lower "friction".

Even though I'm a bit out of good ideas.
Maybe each partclone run could have its logfile name personalized by partition name/number.
Or perhaps you should be able to point out to the existence of clonezilla.log somewhere else in the live environment.

[Steven Shiau]

Thanks for your feedback.
Every log of a partition that Partclone has processed is saved to /var/log/clonezilla.log. You can say that /var/log/clonezilla.log collects all the info about most of the steps that Clonezilla has done.
We will try to show where the log files are in the future release.

Steven

[mirh]

Thanks. I understand this is bordering pedantry... but it's crazy how three times in the last month I used the tool to help some friend, and three times my confidence/bravado/lightheartedness had to be shattered for a hour because of whimsical trivialities (when every other opportunity I had used this at home, everything was beyond nice and dandy).

Anyhow, I would hope something will still be done to improve the "partclone fail" stage too.
If you don't like to have separate partclone log files (I don't know, maybe it seems wasteful to create a new one for something that on average is barely 20 lines long?) then at least have each new run to open the file in "append" mode rather than "overwrite"?

Or perhaps, since you *can* detect when the thing breaks, you could as well ask the user immediately if they just so wished to read the log (and then do/prefill the cli for them).
This way you would also solve the big inconvenience for noobs of not knowing how to navigate a terminal (let alone use nano/vim/cat/more/less to read a file).