Re: [Bug-tar] Option to disable or change device number checking.

[Helmut Waitzmann]

Rob Browning <address@hidden> writes:

>Sergey Poznyakoff <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Hmm, currently there is not. I plan to make tar snapshots with the
>> improved incremental backup available in a couple of weeks. I'll
>> let you know when it is ready.
>>
>> In the meantime, I'd suggest you to use --exclude or --exclude-from
>> options to exclude the devices in question from the backups.
>
>I don't think that will help.  The problem is that all of the disk
>devices change their number (sometimes even the root device), so I'd
>have to --exclude everything.

Could the following precedure be a workaround?

1. Before shutting down your system, create an incremental backup to have
   your backup up to date.

2. Shut down or reboot your system.

3. After booting, immediately create a new full backup, but throw away
   the archive (you may supply /dev/null as a parameter to the "-f"
   option) but keep the created snapshot file as a new starting point.

As far as I can see, you have to do this each time when you restore a
backup, too, as tar cannot dictate the inode numbers to be used when
extracting files.

So I would appreciate an option "--just-snapshot" or
"--no-create-archive" to be used when doing an incremental backup just to
make the snapshot file up to date, because this would save a lot of time
and disk i/o.

What are your opinions?
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