On Wednesday, 08.03.2006 at 12:05 -0500, Jon LaBadie wrote:

> So, rather than use "listed-incremental" to recognize
> it is a renamed directory, gnutar's behavior is to
> consider then entire directory tree "changed" and
> back up the entire tree.
> 
> Reading this thread reminded me of another one where
> the poster was complaining about this "feature" of
> gnutar.  That poster has a lot of rotating log dirs
> that were quite large.  They were rotated by renaming
> them each night (log.2 becomes log.3, log.1 -> log.2 etc.)
> Their complaint was that the data in the directory WAS
> being backed up each night though it was unchanging.
> 
> Be nice if gnutar could deal with both needs.

Indeed, that very issue had occurred to me too :-)

However, directory renames are fairly rare and IMO if there is an
'error' it should be "back up too much but making sure it's
complete" rather than "keep the backup size small but occasionally miss
something important".

Of course, supporting both Would Be Nice, as you say...

Dave.
-- 
Dave Ewart
davee AT ceu.ox.ac DOT uk
Computing Manager, Cancer Epidemiology Unit
Cancer Research UK / Oxford University
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