Snapshots appear to be full back-ups

Hi
BiT uses hard-links for files that haven't been changed between backups. This means that the file only exists once on disk, and the other snapshots simply link to that file.
FAT32, however, does not support hard-links. Check this answer out as well: https://answers.launchpad.net/backintime/+question/72826

Hope that cleared it up!
/N

Thanks, I was thinking it was something like that. I will reformat the drive to ext3 or ext4.

I have a similar query---are snapshots full backups?---, but on an ext3 volume. Below are three snapshots, of roughly same size. Can the presence of binary files make snapshots appear like full backups?
Liviu

>ls -l (10643)
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2010-04-22 10:00 20100422-100041
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2010-05-02 21:09 20100502-210932
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2010-05-05 08:58 20100505-085821
>ls -l (10643) returned '0'

total size: 252.8 Megabytes
in 11263 files and 25 directories
-- end-of-output --
total size: 254.9 Megabytes
in 11369 files and 25 directories
-- end-of-output --
total size: 255.9 Megabytes
in 11402 files and 25 directories
-- end-of-output --

I have reformatted my drive as ext4 and set-up BIT to backup the same directories.

After a few days of running, it appears (through Nautilus) that my drive is consuming space as if they were full backups. However, I ran the "Disk Usage Analyzer" in Ubuntu and found that there was only 20GB consumed, which is the total space. Further the subsequent snapshots directories were very small, reflective of the changes in my data.

I don't know if Nautilus is reading the hard links as actual files? I don't know if BIT will be out of space prematurely as a result of this.

I am really happy with BIT as a simple effective backup system.

Thanks to the devs.

I have done three backups of my home folder (Fedora 13) on a flash drive. The first two show up as 4.8 Gig each; the third is much smaller because I told it not to back up my Music folder. This is not from the command line, or Nautilus, but from Disk Usage Analyzer; the backups really are that big. The whole reason I installed Back In Time was so that I could do incremental backups, but the only thing it seems to do is "snapshots;" full backups, and that's exactly what I don't want. How to I tell Back In Time to stop doing full backups and only do incremental, because if that's all it does, it's useless to me!

They _Appear_ to be full backup because of the hard links. If you take two backups, it may appear that they are for example 10Gb each. Now if you look at the total drive space used, it's most likely less than 20Gb.

How to find out how much was backed up for certain snapshot?
I don't know answer for that, but what I do is to record the amount of free space before taking the backup and compare to the figure after backup. By observing that change I can say for sure that the backup is not a full backup. For example, my latest snapshot is reported by Nautilus to be 110Gb, where in reality it only consumed some 2Gb of space. (I still need to find if there is something useless included). With my current configuration at one point my backups took only 300Mb/week, though the snapshot contains 100+Gb.

So as a summary: Each backup contains all files (=full backup), but space taken is only for the files modified since last time (=incremental backup). Thus with backintime you get the advantages of full backup and incremential backup in one!

Will Disk Usage Analyzer be fooled by the hard links? I don't THINK so. If I right-click on the drive icon and check Properties, will it report the wrong mount of space used? I don't THINK so. Your program was simply backing up the same files over and over. I've nuked the backups, uninstalled your program and am now trying fwbackups to see if it fits my needs because yours certainly doesn't. Don't bother with a reply, because I'm unsubscribing. I no longer use your program and have no interest in it.

Unsubscribe or not, this is gratuitous and unnecessary. This is software that you use for free; unless it nuked your system or something, if you don't like it don't use it. And don't get offensive towards the devels