Help reverting dietpi-backup back to full backups from incremental

Troubleshooting
1

Creating a bug report/issue

I have searched the existing open and closed issues

Required Information

  • DietPi version | G_DIETPI_VERSION_CORE=9
    G_DIETPI_VERSION_SUB=19
    G_DIETPI_VERSION_RC=2
    G_GITBRANCH=‘master’
    G_GITOWNER=‘MichaIng’
  • Distro version | bullseye 0
  • Kernel version | Linux RuuviPi 6.1.21-v8+ #1642 SMP PREEMPT Mon Apr 3 17:24:16 BST 2023 aarch64 GNU/Linux
  • Architecture | arm64
  • SBC model | RPi 4 Model B (aarch64)
  • Power supply used | Geekworm X708 UPS HAT, USB-C 5V 4A Adapter
  • SD card used | SanDisk 128GB MAX Endurance

Additional Information (if applicable)

  • Software title | dietpi-backup
  • Was the software title installed freshly or updated/migrated?
  • Can this issue be replicated on a fresh installation of DietPi?
    ← If you sent a “dietpi-bugreport”, please paste the ID here →
  • Bug report ID | echo $G_HW_UUID

Steps to reproduce

  1. run dietpi-backup
  2. backup to 500GB USB attached m.2 drive managed by dietpi-drive_manager formatted in ext4

Expected behaviour

  • each data_* folder in dietpi-backup should contain a full backup around ~33GB each
  • 10-12 backups should fill the drive and then rollover after each backup
  • each data_* folder size reported correctly around ~33GB

Actual behaviour

  • dietpi-backup does not create a full backup.
  • Each folder appears to be an incremental backup?
  • however the total size of dietpi-backup folder is reported around ~1.24TB… uhhh what?!?

Extra details

  • df -h:
    Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    /dev/root 118G 30G 83G 27% /
    devtmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev
    tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev/shm
    tmpfs 1.6G 162M 1.4G 11% /run
    tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
    tmpfs 3.9G 32K 3.9G 1% /tmp
    tmpfs 50M 20K 50M 1% /var/log
    /dev/mmcblk0p1 127M 32M 95M 26% /boot
    /dev/sda1 458G 38G 420G 9% /mnt/51a06b5d-f9f5-484c-a05c-dcc81a50e522
    tmpfs 787M 4.0K 787M 1% /run/user/0

smartctl reports drive as OK.

Everything was fine until a recent update, sometime in the past 6 months, no idea what update caused the backup behavior to change. How do I revert to non-incremental backups?

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2

It came with v9.17

DietPi-Tools | DietPi-Backup If multiple backups are created (and kept), the rsync --link-dest option is now used to create files which did not change between last and current backup iteration as hard links to the last iteration. This usually leads to massively reduced effective disk usage and backup speedups, since unchanged files do not need to be copied, while every backup iteration however remains fully self-contained. Many thanks to @nicojx for making us aware of rsnapshot, which uses the same technique: MichaIng/DietPi?7711

There is no way back, why would you wanna go back?
I guess Windows does not handle ext4 with hard links well. 33GB * 39 is roughly 1.2 TB, but in fact, you have only stored files “worth” of 39GB. You can now save a lot more backups, I don’t get why you want the old behavior back :sweat_smile: