On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 04:13:27PM -0300, Bruno Negrão wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> I just recovered my first backup successfully using amanda and I noticed a
> phenomenon which IŽd like to receive opinions from you.
> 
> I fully backed up the /etc directory of one of my servers and restored in the
> /root/etc directory. These two directories differ each other on its sizes, 
> where
> the original /etc directory is slightly bigger than its backup. See bellow the
> output of the du command which demonstrates this difference:
> 
> [root@skylane root]# du -sk /root/etc
> 24869   /root/etc
> [root@skylane root]# du -sk /etc
> 24885   /etc
> 
> Is this normal?
> The backup process didnŽt show any error message.

Jay pointed out that dir sizes do not necessarily shrink when
a number of files are removed, but only expand to their required
size upon recreation.  So there could be wasted space in some
of the original dirs.

Another thing, you are comparing a snapshot from some previous
time with the state of the /etc directory now.  Certainly some
things could have changed.

Finally see if your system has a dircmp command.  Run it as
"dircmp /etc /root/etc".  It will list any files in one tree
but not in the other and then, for each file present in both
trees show if they are the same, different, or directories.

If you don't have the command, you can do basically the same
thing with a series of shell commands.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)