I don't use kdar, I use dar from the command line, so expect my responses to require running konsole. ;-> Bob Stia wrote: >Did a differential backup tonight of ~/home. Seems to be very small >(220 kb) I guess this means that the differential backup only saved >things that were new? ( have added and deleted many files during this >period though ) > > You can run 'dar --list path_to_backup' to get a listing of what dar included and recorded about the state of the filesystem at the time of the backup. Anything with "[Saved]" was a new or modified file that was backed up, anything with "[ ]" was not modified since the reference backup. Anything not listed there, but is listed in the reference backup, is a deleted file. >Kdar will NOT modify the original backup, right?? It will only create a >new differential file based on the old one, right? > > Correct, at least for dar. > Sooo....If I had to do a backup I would have to first reinstall the >original backup and then follow up with the differential/incremental ?? > > You mean "restore", right. Yes...you have to restore each backup in sequence, in the same order they were made. Each restore after the first one creates, updates, or deletes files as necessary to update the filesystem to the same state it was in at the time that backup was made. There are options to control this with the command line though, so you can choose not to overwrite existing files, or not to delete files. Kdar should have buttons for these options... My typical restore command looks something like: > cd /home > for x in `find /mnt/backups -name home.1.dar | sort`; do % darname=`basename $x .1.dar` % dar --extract $darname -N --verbose % done If you are not familiar with find, sort, et al, the find command looks for every file named home.1.dar, and "sort" sorts them alphabetically. This works for me because each backup I make is made into a directory with the date and time, like /mnt/backups/20050327_1615/home.1.dar. Basename simply strips off the ".1.dar" from the name, because dar is a bit funny about its file names. ___________________________________________________ . Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.