NetBackup Incrementals and Moved Files
If you are using incremental backups with Veritas NetBackup (whether differential or cumulative) you should be aware that by default NetBackup decides whether to back up a file based on its mtime or Modification Time. This means the time shown on the file if you do a normal ls -l. This may not be desirable if you are moving files between backup clients.
If, for example, you “rsync -av” a directory from one server to another, the modification time of the files will not change so any files last modified in 2002 will still have a 2002 mtime and therefore have not changed since the last full backup. This means NetBackup will ignore those files until your next full backup and potentially leave you without the backups you thought you had.
The solution is to set NetBackup to consider the ctime in determining inclusion in incremental backups. The ctime is the inode modification time, effectively meaning the time that information about the file last changed rather than the time the file itself last changed. You can check a file’s ctime with
A newly moved, but unmodified, file’s ctime will be the time it was moved to the filesystem (or the time file permissions or other metadata last changed after it was moved).
To do this, set the following in the client’s bp.conf (usually /usr/openv/netbackup/bp.conf):
For more information on this, see:
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/200644.htm
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