Re: New data reported too big

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On 10/07/13 10:37, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 3:46 PM, Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com> wrote:
>> On 10/06/13 14:26, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>> On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 10:27 AM, Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com> wrote:
>>>> Tarsnap stores a 512-byte tar header for each file, and this header
>>>> includes the file modification time. 22,000 files x 512 bytes/file = 11.2
>>>> MB, so this looks like the reason for the new data you're seeing.
>>>
>>> Aha!  Is there an easy way to turn that off?  I archive a fair amount
>>> of autogenerated data, and the timestamps are completely worthless as
>>> far as I'm concerned.
>>
>> No way to turn it off.  The best I can suggest is to compare your old and
>> new autogenerated data and only install the new data if it's different.
> 
> Yuck.  Can I request this as a feature for the next release
> (--no-cmtime or something like that)?

I've put this onto my "requested features" list, but at the moment I can't see
any good way to do this -- the (tar) format Tarsnap uses internally has a field
for file modification time and if I just zero that field you'd get files being
extracted with an mtime of January 1, 1970...

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid