[Bug-tar] --listed-incremental still failing

[MrC]

I'm still hoping for some comment or resolution to --incremental failures.

I've been monitoring my incremental backups, to see if I can uncover any
additional clues as to why listed-incremental continues to fail on a daily
basis.

I setup a cron job to do an hourly recursive ls (-lR --full-time) of the
source directory.  For several days, there were no changes, and the output
from the incremental tar run shows my label:

  Archive: albums 2007-06-20 incr
/home/Backups/2007_06/albums/00_snapshot.snar

This is the first clue that something is incorrect.  All other incremental
tar runs show that each incremental tar should minimally output the label
along with a listing of every directory.  A table of contents confirms the
.tar file contains only the label.

After a change was made in the source directory, an incremental run should
have picked up the changes.  But it fails to detect any change at all.
Here's the ls difference for one of the modified files.  The changes were
made on June 19th:


< -rw-r--r--    1 apache   apache     292638 2007-01-20 16:32:56.000000000
-0800 photos.dat
---
> -rw-r--r--    1 apache   apache     292638 2007-06-19 17:06:16.000000000
-0700 photos.dat

And yet, each tar file shown below only contains a label, and there
certainly were no files archived on the 19th or 20th:

-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  346 Jun 20 02:01 00_snapshot.snar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  147 Jun  2 02:01 02_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun  3 02:01 03_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun  4 02:00 04_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun  5 02:02 05_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  149 Jun  6 02:01 06_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun  7 02:02 07_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun  8 02:01 08_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root 306M Jun  8 09:53 08_incr.2.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  40K Jun  8 09:53 08_incr.3.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  40K Jun  8 09:53 08_incr.4.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  40K Jun  8 15:49 08_incr.5.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  40K Jun  8 16:20 08_incr.6.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  40K Jun  8 20:38 08_incr.7.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun  9 02:01 09_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun 10 02:01 10_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun 11 02:02 11_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun 12 02:01 12_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun 13 02:01 13_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun 14 02:01 14_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun 15 02:01 15_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun 16 02:01 16_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  149 Jun 17 02:01 17_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  149 Jun 18 02:01 18_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun 19 02:01 19_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  148 Jun 20 02:01 20_incr.1.tar
-rw-rw---- 1 mrc root  100 Jun 20 02:01 Log

Log:
  Archive: albums2007-06-20 incr
/home/Backups/2007_06/albums/00_snapshot.snar

I'm sure this is a difficult bug; I can appreciate that.  I just need a
reliable backup tool.  I'm sure there is a desire to resolve this, but I'd
appreciate a little feedback either way, so that a workable solution can be
found.

tar --version
tar (GNU tar) 1.17

Thanks in advance,
MrC



> > > MrC  ha escrit: 
> > > 
> > > > I'm seeing an issue with tar 1.16 (plus patch indicated
> > below) where
> > > 
> > > Please try the CVS version, or at least the latest 
> stable, which is 
> > > 1.16.1.  There were several incremental-related fixes recently.
> > > 
> > > Regards,
> > > Sergey
> > 
> > Thanks for the response Sergey.  Unfortunately, today's CVS 
> does not 
> > resolve the problem.  Incremental is still randomly either 
> performing 
> > essentially a full archive, or nothing at all.  I can't 
> determine what 
> > triggers the randomness, but it seems to be related to prior 
> > incremental runs, which store their archives in peer subdirectories 
> > (eg. dir/backupA, dir/backupB, ... dir/backupC).  If I do an 
> > incremental backup on only dir/backupC repeatedly, 
> incremental seems 
> > to work.
> > If I run all backups, dir/backupC will then perform a full backup, 
> > despite previously having just completed many individual 
> incremental 
> > backups for dir/backupC.
> > 
> > Any other ideas for debugging ? 
> > 
> > MrC
> > 
> 
> Sorry, don't mean to be a pest.  Any help or progress on this 
> issue with listed-incremental ? 
> 
> Thanks, 
> MrC