Can tar ignore ctime when doing incrementals?

[Brian White]

In my recent work with Amanda, I found the warnings about using the option
--atime-preserve because doing so causes the ctime to change.  And when
ctime changes, then an incremental backup will grab the entire file.

What about an option that tells gnutar to ignore the ctime when doing an
incremental backup?  For the most part, the inode information is not all
that important as long as the contents of the file are available.

I suppose one could go a step further and have it just copy the new inode
information and not archive the file contents, but that would require extra
knowledge by external programs like Amanda since info for a single file would
now be in two places (one with data, one with inode info).

                                          Brian
                                 ( address@hidden )

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