Incremental vs. tar.gz backup

[0utlier]

Let's say you do daily backups. Does the tar method of backing up delete the previous nights tar file, and then does it create a brand new tar file with files only found in the account at that moment? Or, does it just add new files to the tar file, keeping files that may have been deleted by the user? I'm fairly certain it deletes the old tar file and creates a new one, however I feel I have to ask.

The reason is with incremental backups, the backups just get larger, and larger, and larger, as files aren't deleted from the backup. Only changed files are updated. So if a client adds a bunch of images one day those images get backed up. If the user then deletes all those images from their account the next day, those images still stay with the incremental backup. They don't get deleted. At least this has been my experience as I just went through a restore with incremental backups and users complained of having many files that they had deleted previously. This also caused disk quota issue.

[adept2003]

Does this bugzilla report apply to you? http://bugzilla.cpanel.net/show_bug.cgi?id=2257

If not, you may want to submit a bugzilla report here: http://bugzilla.cpanel.net

[0utlier]

The files get updated properly. It's just with incremental backups the old files that have been backed up previously, but are now no longer in the users account, don't get deleted from the backup. This may be how it was designed. However, I only want files backed up that are currently in their account. For daily backups, I don't want any files in the backup that may have been in their account yesterday, or two days ago, or last month. Only files that were in their account at the time the backups began.

If you have to re-create the account using incremental backups you will get ALL files the users has put in their account since you started using incremental backups. All the changed files are updated correctly, but you also get all previously deleted files too that aren't in the users account now, but were backed up previously.

If using the tar method of backups doesn't do this then I will switch to that method. So the question still stands. Does the tar method only backup what is in the users account at the moment the backups run? I hope I'm not making the question harder than it should be. Thank you.