I'm probably doing something really stupid here, but I can't get star to append files reliably. I'm using star rather than tar because I want to save the security context info for SELinux in FC.

The following is a snippet from an incremental backup file I run, and this works fine (I tailored it in response to the problems I'll explain below).

(find /home -daystart -mtime -2 -print; \
find /root -daystart -mtime -2 -print; \
find /var/www -daystart -mtime -2 -print; \
find /etc -daystart -mtime -2 -print; \
find /storage/Samba -daystart -mtime -2 -print) | (star -xattr -H=exustar -r -acl list=- f="$DEST" -not pat=/storage/Samba/Backup_Exclude/\*)

However the following does not

find /home -daystart -mtime -2 -print | star -xattr -H=exustar -c -acl list=- f="$DEST"
find /root -daystart -mtime -2 -print | star -xattr -H=exustar -r -acl list=- f="$DEST"
find /var/www -daystart -mtime -2 -print | star -xattr -H=exustar -r -acl list=- f="$DEST"
find /etc -daystart -mtime -2 -print | star -xattr -H=exustar -r -acl list=- f="$DEST"
find /storage/Samba -daystart -mtime -2 -print | (star -xattr -H=exustar -r -acl list=- f="$DEST" -not pat=/storage/Samba/Backup_Exclude/\*)


All I'm trying to achieve is a backup of various data files from midnight yesterday (I'm planning to play with the start times once I get the basics correct).

The second version will add files from /home and /root, andf that is it. No errors are reported, and evewrything looks like it's working fine. However a star -t reveals only the first couple of lines add anything.

Strangely it has worked completely a couple of times (the -acl is there as an attempt to fix the problem and I'm not sure I need it).

Has anyone encountered anything similar?

Is it me or my version of star (star 1.5a54 (i386-redhat-linux-gnu)) or something else?

I can't see anything useful on the web, and I've tried -u (update) in place of -r (replace).

Thanks in advance

You reminded me that my backup was already long due... thanks.

I assume you can read man pages as well, so this might be a stupid statement, but it says:

That is the only thing I can think of...

Have you tried to redirect the output of find into a file and use this file with the list= command? Just for testing.

jlinkels

No I hadn't. I'll give it a go. However, if I do each star individually using -c and a unique destination, it creates the file with the correct contents OK.

Have fun backing up

Today I created a number of directories in /tmp, like /tmp/1, /tmp/2 etc. In each directory I created some files, a,b,c, etc.

Then I used the backup commands as you posted them (the second set). It worked perfectly.

Did you use the -vv flag?




jlinkels

PS. For my backup I use different archives, although for diff backups I put everything on one tape.