Hi folks,

Over at 
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/limitations.html#incremental_backups_might_not_be_accurate
 
there is documented a limitation of BackupPC incrementals with tar: 
since it uses timestamps only, it may miss if someone does something 
like unpack a ZIP file that contains files with timestamps in the past. 
  It also won't note if files were deleted.

However, this is not necessarily an insoluble problem with GNU tar.  GNU 
tar has a "listed incremental" mode which works around this problem. 
See the documentation at [1].

I am thinking it may be possible to do this with some simple shell 
scripting (writing out a snapshot file based on the backup number, and 
for incrementals copying the snapshot file from the backup the 
incremental is based on over to one for the current run) without 
modification to BackupPC itself.  However, I'm unsure whether BackupPC's 
custom tar parsing would work well with the result.

It would certainly be better to see this code integrated into BackupPC 
directly.

Thoughts?

[1] 
http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/Incremental-Dumps.html#SEC94

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Free Software Download: Index, Search & Analyze Logs and other IT data in 
Real-Time with Splunk. Collect, index and harness all the fast moving IT data 
generated by your applications, servers and devices whether physical, virtual
or in the cloud. Deliver compliance at lower cost and gain new business 
insights. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-dev2dev 
_______________________________________________
BackupPC-users mailing list
BackupPC-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
List:    https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users
Wiki:    http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net
Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/