Re: Perfomance problem backupscript (more details and tests)

David Brown <[email protected]> wrote:

> > This is with gnutar 1.13.25.
>
> I just reported a bug in incremental restore in 1.15.1.  I would suggest
> that you upgrade to 1.15.1 if you want to trust gnu tar with incrementals.
> The restore problem I found manifests itself by leaving certain files
> around after the restore (it fails to delete symlinks that don't point to a
> real file).

There are many other problems with incrementals using GNU tar.
GNU tar does absolutey not grok the case when a directory is renamed......

it also does not work with old Linux versions that do not touch the
ctime of a file in case it is renamed. Star is happy in case the
mtime of the related directories are touched.

GNU tar incrementals have been created 12 years ago but none of the bugs have 
been fixed until very recently (past 1.15.1). This is why I don't understand the
amanda people.

With star, I make an incremental backup _and_ restore every night for Berlios
since a year. So far we had three problems that all have been fixed and the last
problem is more than half a year ago. For your notice: 170 GB FS space is backed
up incrementally. Every night approx. 10 GB change and a few thousand 
files/directories are renamed or removed. The last bug (the one that caused a 
problem on February) has been fixed on June 8th. Since then, I completely trust
incrementals with star.

Note that I know of no case where people did run similar tests with GNU tar.
Making incremental backups does not show you the problems you get with 
incremental restores.......

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:[email protected] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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