tar incremental backup is backing everything up, every time

Posted by Cyclic on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Cyclic
Published on 2013-11-08T03:48:45Z Indexed on 2013/11/08 3:57 UTC
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backup

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tar

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incremental-backup

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?

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