George Sinclair wrote:

> Is there a way to tell NetWorker to only back up a file if its
> modification time has changed and not its changetime? Or maybe, when the
> modification time changes, the changetime changes, too? I guess what I'm
> asking is if there's a way to NOT back up the files if only something
> like permissions, group, user, etc. has changed and only back it up if
> there's actually been a modification to the file itself and not merely
> its meta data.
> 
> For example, if some joker runs something like 'chmod -R u+x' against a
> directory, NetWorker will re-backup all those files since the changetime
> has now been affected. As near as I can tell there's no way to directly
> change the changetime, but doing anything like chmod, chown or chgrp
> against a file will affect a new changetime, and NetWorker definitely
> appears to notice.
> 
> We have a large directory where someone is running a script that uses
> chown, chgrp and chmod against it every night, but the modification
> times are not changing. Essentially causes as much data as a full to get
> backed up during incrementals. 

No there isn't a way to do this and I can't imagine anyone within Legato
thinking it would be a good idea to provide this feature, I certainly
think it would be pretty dumb. When you do a recovery you expect all the
attributes of the recovered files to be the same as they were on the
date selected for the recovered data. If the attributes of a file are
being modified then it has to be regarded as a change so it needs to be
backed up, no question about it in my opinion.

What is it that concerns you about this? Is it the extra time taken for
the backups, or the media used? I think if you will do the sums you will
find that the saving in media would barely justify the time taken for
you to post these questions to the list. It's probably not even worth
worrying about.

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