Hi Colin and Graham -- thank you for your replies!
Indeed I've never set up an automatic backup process, and list-archives (thankfully) shows no surprises. My cachedir is inside an encrypted container and outside /tmp. Also, I do not back it up on Tarsnap (in case that changes things, although it probably shouldn't).
To my great surprise, I just managed to create an archive after restarting (bugs do have a tendency to become shy when attempting to replicate them). I'll make sure that I save the output from ls -l and the shasum of cachedir after every backup, to see what could the issue be. I'd gladly share the output here, but I don't know if it's wise to do so from a security perspective.
Just that I understand 100% correctly, the cachedir should only change whenever I run an archive, right?
Thank you!
On 9/15/22 11:18, Graham Percival wrote:
> Assuming that's not the case, I would try making a copy of your cache
> directory, or at least recording the directory listing. For example,
> right now my casual "garbage test tarsnap" cachedir is:
>
> $ ls -l ~/.test-tarsnap/cache/
> total 76
> -rw-r--r-- 1 td td 103 May 13 12:26 cache
> lrwxr-xr-x 1 td td 64 May 13 12:26 cseq -> 5c10f4d39bc2508073a02cc8710821800f5f970d1255497f53d493e58dc399da
> -rw-r--r-- 1 td td 72264 May 13 12:26 directory
> -rw-r--r-- 1 td td 0 May 13 12:20 lockf
>
> If I checked that in a day or two and found different dates and cseq (without
> myself consciously making a new archive), that would be very weird.
The other possibility which comes to my mind is that MacOS might be deleting
the cache directory when you reboot. You don't want to put it into /tmp/,
for example...
--
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid