I made an incremental backup about 10 months ago (on Jan 27, 2013), creating a .snar metadata file. Now, when I try to make an incremental backup using
tar --create --file=dropbox_incremental_1.tar --listed-incremental=dropbox_0.snar Dropbox
the command just re-backs up everything.
I'm not an expert at Unix timestamps, but I noticed that virtually all of my directory timestamps are way more recent than the last time they changed. For my actual files, they look like this:
Access: 2013-03-12 19:04:51.000000000 -0500
Modify: 2012-09-30 15:10:47.000000000 -0500
Change: 2013-03-12 19:04:51.306209672 -0500
The 'Modify' timestamp seems correct, but the files were definitely not changed (at least not doing anything that I know of) at the time they say they were. These files still seem to go into the incremental archive.
What's happening here? Is there a way to tell tar to look at the 'modify' timestamp? Isn't this what it's supposed to be doing?
Best Answer
You didn't mention the filesystem/device type, but you could try:
Also see Fixing Snapshot Files.