> The device ID of my partition containing my home directory
> changes (sometimes) when I reboot
This is an intrinsic behaviour of the Linux kernel, and it is
futile to fight it (it also depends on enumeration order). Note
that is the id of the special device file which has no intrinsic
significance, unlike that disk id in the label, or the partition
id (for GPT), or the filesystem id (for most filesystems), so
using it to uniquely identify archived files is "dubious".
> Changing device ID's causes havoc with tar incremental backups
> - tar consider all files are new.
For that reason there is a specific option in recent versions of
GNU 'tar':
"--no-check-device
Do not check device numbers when creating incremental archives."
