Re: [Bug-tar] directory rename and deletion conflict breaks incremental restore

[Joerg Schilling]

Bdale Garbee <address@hidden> wrote:

> A user of my Debian packaging of tar notes that an incremental dump
> during which a directory is deleted and another directory is renamed to
> match the original name of the deleted directory will fail to restore:
>
>   tar: Cannot rename `tartest/dir2' to `tartest/dir1': Directory not empty
>   tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

This is a problem that I reported in 2004 already. The problem was discovered 
while running the first test for the new incremental dump/restore format in 
star.

I am not sure whether it is possible to solve the problem without introducing a 
new incompatible dump format in GNU tar. AFAIK Gnu tar tries to detect and 
understand all changes while creating the archive by using a partial database 
during create. Star detects and understands changes at extract time by using a 
complete database which coveres all files.

Star with it's incremental dump format that was inspired by ufsdump is able to 
handle all known deltas on a filesystem. 

        ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/star/

Star is running an incremental dump + incremental restore once a day on 
berlios.de with not a single problem since March 2005. There is a typical 
amount of 2-10 GB of changes per day and more than 2000 successful dump/restore 
operations in incremental mode since then.


Jörg

-- 
 EMail:address@hidden (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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