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Why is the data backed up again?


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Lennart,

 

While I do believe that this is a bug, it might be for a different reason than your screenshots indicate (thanks, that explains a lot).

 

Retrospect is doing its comparison based on the metadata reported by the filesystem calls, not by the stuff reported in the user interface.

 

For example, the filesystem timestamps are in microsecond ticks (or some similar quantum), not seconds as displayed. There may be other tiny differences in metadata. So, simply because the timestamps look identical may not mean that they are.

 

Personally, I think that the user interface for the matching options should be very different from what it is, perhaps a list of checkboxes for each of the metadata items that are actually compared by the program, and with a "fuzz" value for comparing things such as timestamps (i.e., within x seconds, something like that). And there is always the possibility of a bug, as if Retrospect doesn't have any of those.

 

Just to toss out something else for you to consider, because the property values being viewed in the GUI aren't the same as the low-level values being compared.

 

Russ

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Our situation is similar. We back up a network of around 30 Macs and around 30 PC's running a mix of Win98 and XP. The backup is running on a Mac running 6.1.230. Life is great with the backups of the Macs and the Win98 computers. Very reliable. But...the XP computers...

 

Regularly, the server decides to back up the entire drive again. It's easy to spot as a given backup suddenly takes multiple tapes, as the backup size goes from a few hundred MB to many GB.

 

We thought there was something special going on for those XP PC's where this has been happening. Maybe some software was being reinstalled or run that modified a lot of files. BUT further testing shows it happens on all the XP clients. We don't see a pattern of when it happens but are suspicious in seeing posts about daylight savings time issues since that change just happened.

 

We know one of the PCs where this just happened has had no software reinstalled or anything special; it's just used for some web browsing and OpenOffice applications.

 

We have the same problem with a wide variety of Retrospect clients. This includes client versions 6.0, 6.5, 7.1.(various revisions). Thus it doesn't seem to matter what Retrospect client is used, as we've experimented with several different versions on each PC client.

 

Thoughts?

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