Re: tar incremental backups

[Paul Eggert]

Shaheen Tonse <address@hidden> writes:

> As a criterion for whether a file should be backed up or not, tar
> seems to use the last time it was accessed (as seen with ls -ltu)
> rather than the modification time (seen with ls -lt).

That's odd, since the source code seems to refer only to mtime and ctime.
(I'm looking at the source code for 1.13.25.)

Perhaps it's a problem with ctime, not atime?  Tar has to save files
whose ctime has changed, since it has to save their changed metadata.