Re: [Bug-tar] Incremental extract improvement

[Ian Turner]

On Wednesday 10 May 2006 21:18, Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:
> > Over here in the Amanda project, we get users *all the time* who are
> > confused why other files in the directory structure they just restored
> > to have  suddenly been blown away.
>
> This can mean two things: either these users don't read the
> documentation or that the documentation itself is poorly written.

A little from column A, a little from column B...

> > IMNSHO it would be better if the incremental
> > restore works analogously to the non-incremental restore: That is, to not
> > delete stuff not mentioned in the archive.
>
> Than it would not be incremental restore. It's main purpose is to
> restore the filesystem in exactly the same state it had when dumped.

Eh, a more common understanding of incremental extraction is like patch: 
"Apply the difference between this archive and this other archive as stored 
in this archive here." I don't think that says anything about what should 
happen to other, unrelated files. GNU tar is the only tool I'm aware of that 
goes deleting unrelated files.

Look at it this way: If the user really just wants to start from scratch, it 
is easy to blow away an existing directory, then do all the appropriate 
restores. But if the user does *not* want this, it requires many more 
operations to make the restore to some other place and then copy it into the 
directory structure s/he is interested in.

Cheers,

--Ian

-- 
Zmanda: Open Source Data Protection and Archiving.
        http://www.zmanda.com