Paul Fox writes:
> i just did a restore of a directory (happily not because of
> disaster, but because it was an easy way to get at some files
> that live on a machine that's currently offline) and had a big
> surprise.
>
> i was accessing an incremental backup tree. since all backups
> are "filled", i was very surprised when my restored tree was
> obviously incomplete. then i remembered that i had created the
> directory several days ago (but _after_ the most recent full
> backup) by doing a "cp -a" of a neighboring directory (i was
> cloning a build tree). of course the date-preserving nature
> of "cp -a" meant that my tar-based incremental backup didn't pick
> up any files whose dates were older than the previous full, even
> though those files had never been backed up.
Yes, your explanation is correct. Tar and Smb incrementals are based
only on mtime, so adding/deleting/renaming files, changing other
meta-data, or unpacking an archive with old mtimes won't be
detected. See the last link of:
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/limitations.html
> no data was actually lost, and all is well, but now i'm curious --
> would rsync have done the "right thing" in this case?
Yes. Rsync incrementals check all the meta data, plus detecting
new or deleted files.
> the only reason i don't use rsync is because it doesn't preserve
> hard links, which i use fairly frequently. but i may reconsider...
The next version of BackupPC and File::RsyncP will support
hardlinks. But there isn't a firm release date yet.
Craig
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