On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Philip Guenther wrote:
Or failed to perform catastrophic recovery instead of normal recovery. (I.e, db_recover must be invoked with the -c option.)
Well, while I won't discount the possibility I screwed up the copy, I still think it's unlikely and also that theory doesn't explain why the master (with the original uncopied database) died as well. Also, nothing was running during the copy, so it wouldn't have been considered a hot backup? And while still possible, it seems unlikely that this problem would not manifest for 10 months, and then just after an upgrade...
So, as a practical matter, if you're using DB_LOG_AUTOREMOVE, then you need to shut down before trying to back up the database at the DB level.
We actually rely on slapcat for backup. The database files haven't been touched (other than by slapd) or copied since the initial slapadd.