On May 8, 2013, at 8:16 PM, "NeilBrown" [off-list ref] wrote:

The backup.md file really should not have been empty.
Assuming you are sure it was the right file something must have gone wrong.
Not overly surprising as it is hard to test that particular stage of reshape:
an interruption to the reshape very late in a shrink could get messy.

I've made a note to try testing it when I next spend some time on mdadm.

Thanks,
NeilBrown

That makes sense then, both times that I had this problem it was empty and there was nothing that could have caused it to have a problem.  I'll play with a couple things and see if I can find where the issue was also.

Thank you...
Sam