Len Philpot wrote:
The subject line is close to what I'm asking, but here's what's happened.
We recently put the latest available client for Netware: 7.2.1, etc., on
our Netware clients. The Solaris Networker server is still 7.2, but both
will move at some point... hopefully... maybe before I die... :-\
Anyway, with this client our weeknight differentials were averaging
between 50% and 99% of the size of our fulls run just a day or two
earlier. That is, for some reason it was seeing ***WAY*** too many files
as having been touched, when they hadn't been modified. Typically our
diffs are between ~10% and ~40% at most. Putting the old client back ended
this behavior, but now we have a number of clients with exceedingly large
differentials that will continue to be at least that large until the next
full backup is run, three days away. So what I'm doing tonight is running
full backups of some of them to "reset the pointers" so subsequent diffs
will be normal.
If putting the old client back fixed the problem then maybe my surmise
is incorrect here, but is it possible that the file permissions,
ownership or group somehow changed? The only time I've seen files get
backed up that shouldn't - this was on Unix - was when the change of
file status occurred wherein the files' permissions, ownership or group
had been changed, but its content did not. In other words, someone or
some process, ran some operation, e.g. 'chown' or 'chmod' on a bunch of
files, which forces a change of file status (in the inode) on the
affected files, so the modtimes remain as they were (ls -ld file), but
the file status is new (ls -lc file).
It's my understanding that NW captures files whose file status has been
updated since the previous backup, not the modtime. But, of course,
anytime the modtime changes, so does the file status time, but not
necessarily vice versa, e.g. chown, chmod, etc. In fact, even if the
permissions, ownership or group is reset to what it already is, the
change of file status is still updated. Not sure if any of this is the
case with Netware?
My question is - Is there any other way to reset things for a given client
to "unmodified" without actually running a full backup, so that subsequent
diffs will truly be changed files only? Or is this insane?
We had a client once wherein a bunch of files kept getting their
permissions changed every night, forcing huge incrementals, so I
overrode the default backup behavior and created a directive that forced
the backups to operate based on modtime, e.g.
<< /path >>
+mtimeasm: .?* *
I'd certainly rather do some index twiddling if possible rather than use
up tapes and time running an otherwise needless full backup of each.
Thanks!
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