Re: question about creation of archives

2018-07-18 Thread Graham Percival 
On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 05:51:02PM -0700, Colin Percival wrote:
> The 'include' directive is kind of broken.  Or rather, it works,
> but the situations where it's useful are so rare that it confuses
> people more than it helps them.

In more detail, "include" is inherited from BSD tar(1).

http://www.tarsnap.com/selecting-files.html
- Any include option will back up only those files and directories.
- The process of recursing into subdirectories is also affected.  Adding this
  to the config file:
  include /home
  and then attempting to back up / results in **nothing** being backed up.

This is very counter-intuitive, but we are reluctant to diverge from tar(1)
unless we have a very good reason.

Cheers,
- Graham

Re: question about creation of archives

2018-07-17 Thread Colin Percival 
On 07/16/18 10:00, Albert Cardona wrote:
> In invoking the command:
> 
> $ /usr/bin/tarsnap -c --configfile ~/.tarsnaprc -f backup-`date
> +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S` --totals --dry-run /home/albert
> 
> ... I am greeted with:
> 
> tarsnap: Warning: Archive contains no files
> 
> The /home/albert directory is certainly not empty.
> The ~/.tarsnaprc contains a number of include directories like:
> 
> include /home/albert/lab/manuscripts
> include /home/albert/lab/grants

The 'include' directive is kind of broken.  Or rather, it works,
but the situations where it's useful are so rare that it confuses
people more than it helps them.

My recommendation: Remove the 'include' directives from .tarsnaprc
and change your command line to

/usr/bin/tarsnap -c --configfile ~/.tarsnaprc -f backup-`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S`
--totals --dry-run /home/albert/lab/manuscripts /home/albert/lab/grants

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid

question about creation of archives

2018-07-16 Thread Albert Cardona 
Hi all
In invoking the command:

$ /usr/bin/tarsnap -c --configfile ~/.tarsnaprc -f backup-`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S` 
--totals --dry-run /home/albert

... I am greeted with:

tarsnap: Warning: Archive contains no files

The /home/albert directory is certainly not empty.
The ~/.tarsnaprc contains a number of include directories like:

include /home/albert/lab/manuscripts
include /home/albert/lab/grants

Do I need perhaps to include a * in the include declarations, like:

include /home/albert/lab/manuscripts/*
include /home/albert/lab/grants/*

Thank you,

Albert