Re: tarsnap warnings/errors what do they mean

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>
writes:

> On 07/14/11 12:50, Harry Putnam wrote:
>> I got this back from a normal backup run:
>> 
>>  tarsnap -c -f junk-$(dtf) .junk
>> tarsnap: Couldn't list extended attributes: No such file or directory
>> 
>> tarsnap: Couldn't list extended attributesCouldn't list extended
>> attributes: No such file or directory
>> 
>> tarsnap: Couldn't list extended attributesCouldn't list extended
>> attributesCouldn't list extended attributes: No such file or directory
>
> What OS are you running?  Do you have any files which are being deleted
> at the same time as tarsnap is running?  I've never seen these errors
> before.

Gentoo linux kernel 2.6.39

Some deletions would have occurred on Sunday but none the day of the
problem run. There are some symlinks, but tar does the right thing
with those.  

Further this directory is an encrypted (encfs) directory, but when it
is mounted, acts like any other directory.  I've backed it up once
before the same way on tarsnap, but saw no such problems.

I'm going to try a run right now and report.
-------        ---------       ---=---       ---------      -------- 
I got a totally clean run this time...

  tarsnap -c -v -v -f  junk-$(dtf) ~/.junk

[...] snipped long list of files
                                       Total size  Compressed size
  All archives                          47030209524      36001424803
    (unique data)                       34296164508      27775819442
  This archive                              3314305          1364006
  New data                                   562817            44112

I don't quite understand this output.  The part that says:
`New data      562817'   would indicate something like .5 megabyte has
been added.. right?

If that is what it means then I don't understand what is going on.

Every thing that happens in that directory is done manually only by
me, except for a junk.tar.gz backup taken on Sundays thru a script run
by cron.

The most that would have been added since the last backup would be 1
or 2 tiny txt files with no more than 25-30 characters in them.  And in
fact there were probably some backup files (some.txt~ type files) that
were removed since the original backup.