I have a laptop Win 2K box that I am trying to backup to a linux box.

What I do is automount a directory of the Win2K box through samba
(smbfs) and periodically tar up an image of it, using the
--listed-incremental option:

tar --listed-incremental=${backupdir}/tarlist --label "zerbina backup $date" --exclude inbox --exclude="My\ Music" --exclude="fms" --exclude="vm" --exclude="Installs" --exclude="uai-2001-papers" --exclude='5plane-complete.mov' -czf ${backupdir}//${date}.tgz zerbina

[sorry about the long line!]

The problem is that the listed-incremental doesn't seem to work, as
can be seen from this directory listing:

-rw-rw-r--    1 goldman  goldman  435485523 May 11 17:01 2001-05-11.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 goldman  goldman  443176213 May 14 17:19 2001-05-14.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 goldman  goldman  453573798 May 25 17:33 2001-05-25.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 goldman  goldman  453519296 May 29 16:46 2001-05-29.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 goldman  goldman  453806170 May 30 17:10 2001-05-30.tgz

I KNOW I'm not modifying 453 MB of data per day.

The only clue I have is that the tar documentation (which is pretty
poor) says that incremental backups use information from the inode.
So I thought that maybe using smbfs, this inode information is goofy.

Any of you trying to do something similar?  Do you have a work-around?

I have been using taper for backing linux up to tape, so I was
thinking of trying that, but I figured that the incremental on taper
might work equally poorly.  Any suggestions?

Thanks!
R