Hi, I am trying to setup a backup system for a windows box. I have the shares mounted with cifs. the command I'm useing is
The problem is that tar picks up all of the folders as having their names changed. I thought that it was from referring to the shares as absolute locations, so I mounted them relative to the script and used relative paths. However, it is still doing a full dump every time.
Does anyone have any experience with tar --listed-incremental?

I am using gnutar 1.20 and windows server 2k3.

It must be possible because Amanda does this same action without a problem according to this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...backup-587030/

Looking through the amanda source code they actually use the line:
But even playing around with that I couldn't get it to work for this application.

Alternative: as suggested in the above thread using rdup may be a better way to go. However, one of the attractions of using tar is the built in compression abilities. But if you check out this link: http://www.miek.nl/projects/rdup/index.html it has some information on how you can use both of them.

So, either through an actual bug or just lack of documentation the tar option --incremental-backup is unreliable, however the following command uses rdup in conjunction with tar to create the desired effect.

Summary: "tar --listed-increment" is bad "rdup | tar --no-recursion" is good. I have attached my backup script for reference or w/e.

Update: oh no! I have tested this approach overnight and it doesn't work either, checking the rdup dumps I have found that the inode numbers have all changed. It looks as if over the course of two hours the inode numbers that rdup detects on the windows machine all change and cause a full dump.

Attached Files

DailyBackup.txt (2.1 KB, 11 views)

Ok, The problem the whole time was that both rdup and tar --listed-incremental detect every file on the cifs mount as being a new file. The reason for this is that the device number would change due to the automount. Tar has an option to get around this but it wasn't doing the trick. The temporary inode numbers being given to the mounted filesystems was the cause, they were being reassigned every time they were read. To get around this mount your cifs share with the "serverino" option.

That causes the windows machine to assign inode numbers to the files before cifs gets them, and thus they do not get reassigned. However, the windows server must support this and windows servers after 2000 do.

Cool. You've been busy. I'm sure your effort will be appreciated by anyone who has to deal with backing up windows machines from a linux/unix backup server. I'll have to remember your solo thread next time someone with this problem asks for help.