Created attachment 176935 [details] screenshot of tar file beside the _inc tar file SUMMARY Incremental backup archives contain mostly zero size files. Full backups seem fine. I have a simple backup strategy.... i use kbackup to copy a local disk (home and virtual machines, etc) to another disk on the same machine. The source data is quite large - 2.6Tb. The receiving disk is a 10Tb unit, used only for local backups. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Back up a local drive to another local drive. Use an incremental backup with a full backup every 7 days. 2. Set up a cron job to run the kbackup profile daily at 01:00am. 3. Let it run for a few days...all appears well. I see a full backup on the start date, and _inc archives every day 4. Now inspect the _inc files OBSERVED RESULT The _inc files contain a large number of zero length files. The full backups dare OK. EXPECTED RESULT The _inc files hould contain only changed files, but with the correct file sizes SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: KDE neon 6.2 KDE Plasma Version: 6.2.4 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.9.0 Qt Version: 6.8.1 Kernel Version: 6.8.0-51-generic (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 24 × AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor Memory: 125.7 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 6600 Manufacturer: ASUS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION $ tar --version tar (GNU tar) 1.35 Copyright (C) 2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Written by John Gilmore and Jay Fenlason. ==================================================== This is a serious problem, as zero length files will overwrite the real files if a restore is attempted. See attachment for a side by side view of a test tar file, and the _inc kbackup file. ALL the _inc files I have seen so far have the same problem
What you see are not 0-size files, these are _directories_ (the "d" as first character shows this). The incremental backup traverses recursively down the directory trees and in this process adds the dirs into the _inc.tar file, but when there is finally no changed file inside the dir, then the dir entry still ends up in the tar file.
Martin...my bad, and my apologies! You're right. Please close the report.
No problem. closed.