Hi Federico, Tarsnap automatically skips archiving the cachedir, but there's certainly no harm in omitting it from your archived directories.
I think that in your case, if the cachedir changes, then that indicates something weird. The cachedir can change as a result of certain tarsnap operations (such as deleting an archive), but if you don't have an automatic backup process, I would hope that you don't have an automatic archive deletion process! In case you haven't seen it, here's some additional info about the cachedir: https://www.tarsnap.com/cachedir.html Sharing the ls -l from your cachedir on this list is not necessary; I would only send that as a private email to me and Colin. The size of the "directory" file indicates how many blocks you have stored on the tarsnap servers. Due to deduplication, that doesn't reveal a huge amount about your backups -- it would be impossible to tell if you had a few large archives, or many deduplicated small archives -- but it's still private info. Cheers, - Graham On Sun, Sep 18, 2022 at 01:35:55PM +0200, Federico Pereiro wrote: > 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! > > чт, 15 сент. 2022 г. в 21:06, Colin Percival <[email protected]>: > > > 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 > >
