Shonky Posted October 10, 2021 Share Posted October 10, 2021 I have recently implemented hashbackup to replace CrashplanPRO but believe that hashbackup has just made the problem more visible. I had seen Crashplan backing up files more than once but never investigated why mainly because the size wasn't affecting me. Anyway, I'm seeing files that have not been changed in years having their modified/changed times altered. e.g. I do a hashbackup, then run it again a few hours later and something's modified some files e.g. a particularly random one just now: ~# stat "/mnt/user/store/manuals and drivers/A8N-SLI Premium Drivers/15.23_nforce_winxp32_international_whql.exe" File: /mnt/user/store/manuals and drivers/A8N-SLI Premium Drivers/15.23_nforce_winxp32_international_whql.exe Size: 53370976 Blocks: 104248 IO Block: 4096 regular file Device: 2fh/47d Inode: 648799821402998927 Links: 1 Access: (0666/-rw-rw-rw-) Uid: ( 99/ nobody) Gid: ( 100/ users) Access: 2017-04-04 06:21:53.417766486 +1000 Modify: 2008-10-05 09:03:49.000000000 +1000 Change: 2021-10-10 17:53:26.528479637 +1000 Birth: - There's no way I touched it just now. That's about 20 minutes ago. Whole chunks (not every file in a folder though) randomly have their change time altered and the backup program picks it up. Could the file integrity plugin do anything like this? I've set it up recently but pretty sure the repeated backups were happening long before that. If a file is not being actually changed how else could this be happening? All disk file systems are xfs. Not entirely sure what else would be relevant. Nothing in syslog at the change time. Checking the direct /mnt/diskx/... file shows the same info but with the birth field entered (seems just before the access time) Quote Link to comment
Solution primeval_god Posted October 11, 2021 Solution Share Posted October 11, 2021 I dont know for sure but i would suspect it is the file integrity plugin. The "Changed" time reported by stat is the last time that file metadata was changed (most docs list permissions as an example of metadata). The file integrity plugin stores its hash value in the extended attributes. What i dont know is if extended attributes are considred metadata in this instance, but i would suspect so. Quote Link to comment
Shonky Posted February 21, 2022 Author Share Posted February 21, 2022 It did appear to be the file integrity plugin as updating one of the file date attributes resulting in hashbackup backing them up again. I've stopped the plugin for now. Quote Link to comment
bonienl Posted February 21, 2022 Share Posted February 21, 2022 The dynamix file integrity plugin does not touch any file itself, it purely operates on extended attributes. The file modification time is never altered by the plugin. Quote Link to comment
Shonky Posted February 21, 2022 Author Share Posted February 21, 2022 The dynamix file integrity plugin does not touch any file itself, it purely operates on extended attributes. The file modification time is never altered by the plugin. Right but the Change time is being updated (see original post) which appears to be what hashbackup is seeing. Quote Link to comment
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