missing files from incremental backups

Experiment:

One process repeatedly generates a random filename and then touches, removes 
or writes a files by this name (which can result in an existing file to be 
modified). In other words: we have a very simple simulation of an active 
filesystem.

While this goes on, incremental backups of levels 0 to 9 are done with the 
following command:

star -c -xdev -sparse -acl -link-dirs level="${level?}" -wtardumps \
  f=level-"${level?}".star -C "${mount?}" .

Then, the generating process is stopped and one final backup of level 10 is 
made. Nothing modifies the filesystem during this.

A copy of the backed-up filesystem is made using `cp -a' (from now on called 
`the copy'), then the filesystem is deleted and restored with the command 
from the manual page:

cd /filestem-mount-point 
star -xpU -restore f=...

applied to files level-0.star up to level-10.star. During the restore, there 
are several warnings like this one:

star: WARNING: No new inode number for /alive/file_391

Then the copy is compared to the restored filesystem.


I expected that there will be more files on the restored filesystem than in 
the copy. However, this was not the case -- which might not mean much. Forget 
about it for now.

What surprised me, however: after the restore, files were *missing* or had 
*different* *content* compared to the copy. I do not see why this could not 
be trivially prevented using timestamps.

What am I overlooking?

System is Linux 2.6.19.7 with an ext3 filesystem (Trustix 3.0.5).
star is version 1.5a81.

Thanks for an explanation.
Lasse

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