Nadeem M. Khan wrote:

Hi.

I've been trying to get differential backups with tar. I've got it working nice and fine except for one problem. If a file is modified after the last full backup, it gets included in my differential backup, as it should. But my differential backup also includes directories that have not been modified since the last full backup. These directories get included as empty directories. The files in them (rightly) do not get included in the differential.

To create a full backup I do:

tar cvf /backups/full.tar /home

To create a differential, I use the timestamp of the full backup archive as a reference:

tar cvf /backups/diff.tar --newer="`date -r /backups/full.tar`" /home

Works well, except for the directory inclusion part. Am I missing something?

for differential backups I will suggest rsync I am running below script by cron job every day which will create differential backup(daily basis) on current folder and moved only changed file to another folder called changes/`date +%d%m%y`. And verbose mode will generate a detailed report on email every time. And recovery is very easy.

<script> #!/bin/sh export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

BDIR=/path/to/source/folder/ TARGBASE=/backupfolder/current TARGBASE_PREV=/backupfolder/changes

# excludes file - this contains a wildcard pattern per line of files to exclude EXCLUDES=/path/to/excludes

BACKUPDIR=`date +%d%m%y` OPTS="--force --ignore-errors --exclude-from=$EXCLUDES --delete --backup --backup-dir=$TARGBASE_PREV/$BACKUPDIR -av"

rsync $OPTS "$BDIR" $TARGBASE/current </script>

Hope this helps and you can find more resource from http://rsync.samba.org/examples.html

/Benoy