On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 09:30:05AM +0900, David Leangen wrote:
> 
> Well, I guess I'm convinced to try out tar, but not to play the devil's 
> advocate, I'm just curious...
> 
> >I don't (didn't) use tar at Purdue, in general, because it 
> > changes the access time on the files it backs up.  That's a
> > very bad thing.
> 
> Why is this such a bad thing? If we suppose that (1) crashes do not 
> occur often, so recovering is really an extreme situation, and (2) just 
> having the data is "good enough", why would access times and the like 
> matter so much?
> 

Nothing to do with backups, but daily usage and admin functions.
What is access time supposed to record?  The last time the data
in that file was used for some purpose.  I'd rather that the use
that changes atime NOT be backing up the data.  I'd prefer that
atime give some indication of when some human or some application
other than backup used the data.  If every file has the same atime,
i.e. the time of the backup, then a file's atime is a worthless datum.


-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
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