On 20 January 2015 at 22:15, Colin Percival <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> If you run -tv, do you see different timestamps on the files?  Your
> process of
> copying data around sounds like it would have changed the file modification
> times, which would result in entirely new tar archive headers.  8.8 MB is
> around 17000 tar headers; is that how many files you have?
>

Thanks for the analysis Colin.  I had a backup of this archive from Jan 16
before I had the filesystem corruption and I just created a new archive
(today, Jan 21.)  I've done a diff of the "-t -v" output between the two
archives.

>From looking at the first character of the output, there are ~278330 files,
63887 directories, 2637 symbolic links, 22 links, and 4 named pipes in each
archive.  The latter contains a few extra emails (~80kb) over the former,
hence the "~278330".

I had to write a script to process the output in order to be able to do a
diff.  In the archive from Jan 16, according to the "-t -v" output, most
files have a link count of 1, but those same files in the Jan 21 archive
have a link count of 0.  Everything else -- mode, owner, group, size and
mtime -- is identical in the two listings.  The files on the drive itself
are readable and have a link count of 1 when I do an "ls -l" in OS X, with
the drive mounted, and I can also restore files from the Jan 21 tarsnap
archive without error.

When I did the original data restore from the broken drive I used "rsync
-aHv" to copy data off the read-only FS, and "rsync -aHv" to copy it back
to the newly reformatted drive, so perhaps that accounts for the 8.8MB
snapshot size?  Can you think of another reason why the Jan 21 files have a
zero link count?

It's also fine if you don't -- at this stage I'm happy that my data is
safe, and hasn't been corrupted!

Thanks!  <3 tarsnap!

Ed

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