[kwlug-disc] GNU tar incremental backup bug?

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

I have not used tar in that way.
Didn't even know they had that feature.
There is -G for the old incremental format, and -g (--listed-incremental).
So things have been changing.
>From the link you provided, it says:

When extracting from the incremental backup GNU tar attempts to
restore the exact state the file system had when the archive was created.
In particular, it will delete those files in the file system that did not
exist in
their directories when the archive was created.


So maybe it just omits including a file as a way to say it was deleted (or
never
existed in the first place)? Not sure ...

Offtopic by related ...

Rsync also has a feature to do incremental backups, although it is
using hard links to fake the presence of files that have not changed.
This article <https://www.tecmint.com/linux-rsync-incremental-backup-cron/>
describes how it is done.

I have been using incremental backups at the filesystem level
for 15 or 20 years. The filesystem in my case is ext4, and the dump
command does that for me.
I do a full backup on the first day of the month and incremental
every day for the rest of the month, keeping the last 6 days of
incrementals.
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