Re: [Duplicity-talk] file selection behavior

[edgar . soldin]

On 10/13/2018 21:44, Jordan Rosenthal via Duplicity-talk wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a file selection question.
> 
> Suppose I have a directory in which most of the files in change rarely, but 
> one changes daily.  A simple example would look like the following:
> 
> 
> /top/sub/rarelychanges1.txt
> 
> /top/sub/rarelychanges2.txt
> 
> /top/sub/rarelychanges3.txt
> 
> /top/sub/changesdaily.txt
> 
> 
> I would like to back up all the files in /top/sub except changesdaily.txt so 
> I create a filelist with rules that look like:
> 
> 
> -/top/sub/changesdaily.txt
> +/top/sub
> 
> 
> This criteria works as intended, but has one unexpected behavior. Because the 
> modification time property on the directory /top/sub changes whenever the 
> file /top/sub/changesdialy.txt changes, every incremental snapshot I make 
> includes an entry for /top/sub to capture the directory property change.
> 
> I understand why one would want this behavior in general, but I do not care 
> about the modification time change and would like to avoid including this in 
> the snapshot.  On my system, this would prevent the creation of excessive 
> (daily) "duplicity-new-signatures.*.sigtar.gz" files that do not contain 
> content changes I care about.
> 
> Is there any way to do this?

hey Jordan,

tl;dr - no.

that's because the mod time of a folder is not the mod time of the last 
modified file in it. see
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3620684/directory-last-modified-date
or
  
https://superuser.com/questions/1039003/linux-how-does-file-modification-time-affect-directory-modification-time-and-di
.

so either your fs implementation is somewhat special or whatever writes files 
there does not simply change them but overwrites them instead.

as a workaround you could be set the folder mod time manually to a fixed value, 
duplicity should traverse it anyway, but i am not sure that this would be 
advisable.

..ede/duply.net