Re: New data reported too big

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On 10/09/13 00:19, Philipp Riegger wrote:
> On 09.10.2013 01:26, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 4:19 PM, Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com> wrote:
>>> On 10/07/13 10:37, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>>> 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...
>>
>> That's would actually be fine with me.  You could also use some other
>> sentinel value that gets extracted as "now".
> 
> Shouldn't it be possible to reset ctime and mtime of files before adding
> them to the archive (in a script, outside of tarsnap)?

Good point, `find /path/ -print0 | xargs -0 touch -t 197001314159` should
be enough to set the file mtimes to constant values and avoid tarsnap
deciding that it needs to store updated tar headers every time the files
are re-created.

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