Using AMANDA to backup vfat filesystems

Chris Karakas

Due to the interaction of a vfat filesystem with the linux kernel, it is not alsways possible for AMANDA (Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) to use tar to compute incremental backups of SAMBA shares correctly. This document describes a way to circumvent this problem by some simple modifications of the AMANDA source code and a custom gtar-wrapper file.

Copyright © 2001 Chris Karakas. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license can be found at the Free Software Foundation.


Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1. Disclaimer
1.2. Formats
1.3. Problem description
2. Solutions that did not work
2.1. Install tar version 1.13.18
2.2. Use --incremental
2.3. Use --incremental and --newer
3. Solution
3.1. Modifying the AMANDA code
3.2. The gtar-wrapper script
4. How to test
5. Remaining problems