Re: tar incremental backups and ctimeâ problem

[Eric Blake <eblake at redhat dot com>]

On 05/23/2016 03:18 AM, x y wrote:
> It is not clear to me your expectation:
> - are you asking how to use ctime to select the file with tar alone ?
>   It is not possible for my understanding of the manual.
> 
> - Are you asking the package maintainer to change the behaviour of
>   cygwin tar ? Unlikely to happen, but I leave to him.
> 
> Regards
> Marco
> 
> 
> Hi Marco,
> 
> Sorry, I am new to the mailing list. If I am not wrong, tar is
> checking both of the ctime and mtime values to compare files during
> incremental backups. Since opening and closing a MS document without
> changing the content updates ctime, it would be preferable to add a
> new option to tar to use only mtime for file comparing during
> incremental backups.

mtime is fakeable, ctime is not.  Using only mtime makes it likely that
your incremental backup will miss files.  I don't have any good reason
to differ from upstream behavior here.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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