Back In Time

Incremental Backup on Lucid

Asked by jpcjackson

I read a post somewhere that someone was running BIT without difficulty on Ubuntu Lucid. Is that correct? Or perhaps it was the developmental version. With the stable release I can perform a full backup, but each additional backup detects new or changed files first, but then proceeds to do another full backup. This is missing one of BIT attractive features. Perhaps I have missed something. Thoughts and suggestions???

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Solved
For:
Back In Time Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Solved by:
ottod
Solved:
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Dan (danleweb) said : 		#1

BIT use hard-links between snapshots.
A second snapshot may look like a full backup but it share unchanged files with the first snapshot.
If you want to know it hardlinks worked you can check the size (you can use nautilus) of the folder that contains all snapshots and then the size of each snapshot.

Revision history for this message
jpcjackson (jpcjackson) said : 		#2

Thank you Dan. When I next perform a backup and will do this comparison and post my results. I had noticed that BIT performs hard-links only as I also tried to backup a file which contained some short-cut (pointer) links which were not backed.

Another question which you I would like advise about is hidden files. Why are this excluded by default. If one need to restore a folder, then those files would be essential for successful use of the contents, yes?? So shouldn't hidden files be included?

Christopher

Revision history for this message
jpcjackson (jpcjackson) said : 		#3

Sorry for typographical errors in previous post. I am using my tiny Netbook to reply and mistype often.

Christopher

Revision history for this message
Best ottod (otto-sistemasorion) said : 		#4

I came here to Launchpad Answers because of this problem too, but luckily I read a note at the BackInTime home site about FAT/FAT32 and hard links. I do my backups to an external hard disk formatted in FAT32. It happened the same you describe here, a complete backup every time. For a test, I decided to format ext4 a USB flash memory I have and do the backup there. Now it works as advertised, changed files only on the following backups. I guess having it clearly stated on the site, Dan wonders how it does not work for us (we are using a hard link capable filesystem for backups, right?), being most of these secondary units in FAT...

Revision history for this message
jpcjackson (jpcjackson) said : 		#5

Thanks ottod, that solved my question.