tar incremental backup is backing everything up, every time when used on the Dropbox directory

Posted by Cyclic on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Cyclic
Published on 2013-11-08T03:48:45Z Indexed on 2013/11/10 3:58 UTC
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backup

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tar

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incremental-backup

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dropbox

I made an incremental backup about 10 months ago (on Jan 27, 2013), creating a .snar metadata file. Now, when I try to make an incremental backup using

tar --create --file=dropbox_incremental_1.tar --listed-incremental=dropbox_0.snar Dropbox

the command just re-backs up everything.

I'm not an expert at Unix timestamps, but I noticed that virtually all of my directory timestamps are way more recent than the last time they changed. For my actual files, they look like this:

Access: 2013-03-12 19:04:51.000000000 -0500
Modify: 2012-09-30 15:10:47.000000000 -0500
Change: 2013-03-12 19:04:51.306209672 -0500

The 'Modify' timestamp seems correct, but the files were definitely not changed (at least not doing anything that I know of) at the time they say they were. These files still seem to go into the incremental archive.

What's happening here? Is there a way to tell tar to look at the 'modify' timestamp? Isn't this what it's supposed to be doing?

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