Re: tar -c -G -N <date> query

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello Tom!

On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 10:36:37PM +0100, Tom Crane wrote:
> For now: I am aware of '-g'. My objection is with the '-g somefile.dat' -- 
>  what does one do with the file? Supposing one does incremental saves with 
> '-g <tape device> -g somefile.dat' and the HD crashes and a full restore 
> is needed from the last full save plus subsequent incrementals. The 
> questions is where is the somefile.dat? Answer on the dead HD!

Sure.  But the incremental backups may be used even without this file.

When you restore the contents of the crashed HD, you'll probably make
a full backup and start a new line of incremental backups.  You don't
need the old file as you won't continue with the previous line of backups.

You see, HD crashes should not be so frequent event.  ;-)

> One other point: Are you sure the behaviour W.R.T. resaving unchanged 
> files in a subdirectory which has had its mtime changed is different with 
> '-g'.

No, I'm not sure.  All I can say is that it doesn't happen with the newest
version of tar in my environment:
> > I wasn't able to reproduce the bug, so I'd guess that it has been fixed
> > in the last version (1.13.25).

So try to reproduce the bug with tar 1.13.25, and if the bug is still there,
please write another bug report.  Take care to describe your environment,
OS, OS version, gcc version, ...  (the tar source must contain some
instructions about this somewhere).  Post the bug report to address@hidden
and the tar maintainer (or someone else) should respond (I won't probably
have time to work on it, sorry).

> One final point: I've not seen my post appear in Google groups yet. Do you 
> know if the moderator mechanism for gnu.utils.bug is working?

My newsfeed does seem to have the group empty.  So there is a problem
somewhere.  I decided to subscribe to the mailman list directly, see:
http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnu-utils

HTH, and have a nice day,
        Stepan