Re: Oddly large incremental backups

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On 03/06/14 00:58, Asgeir Bjarni Ingvarsson wrote:
> Is there a way to see a diff for an archive or a list of changed files that have
> been included?

No.  The directory-tree-traversal happens long before the deduplication, and by
the time tarsnap is looking at blocks and deciding if they're new, it has long
since lost track of which file(s) each block came from.

> I'm consistently seeing a backup size of ~300MB when I'm expecting much lower
> numbers. I have excluded obvious noise sources such as browser cache, but I'd
> really like to get a list of uploaded files so I can see what exactly is causing
> the backups to inflate like this.

The way I've done this is by running tarsnap with a low --maxbw-rate-up setting,
then running 'while true; do killall -USR1 tarsnap; sleep 1; done' in another
terminal.  That prompts tarsnap to print its progress every second, and if you
see that it's stuck on a file for a long time, it means that file contains lots
of new data.

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