what is the fbackup "dates"

[Tony Kuehn]

I noticed today that all are servers that use fbackup wrote to a /var/adm/fbackupfiles/dates file. On our servers that do full fbackups every night this file does not appear to be written to on a consistant basis. For example, the last time this file was written to for most servers was 2000.
However, on our servers that do incremental fbackups this file appears to be written to diaily (and truncated to a week of data?).

Just wondering if anyone has any information about this file and when it is written to, what references it, etc...???

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

From the fbackup man page. (It's amazing what's in the man pages.) :)

If fbackup is used for incremental backups, a database of past backups
must be kept. fbackup maintains this data in the text file
/var/adm/fbackupfiles/dates, by default. Note that the directory
/var/adm/fbackupfiles must be created prior to the first time fbackup is used for incremental backups. The -d option can be used to specify an alternate database file. The user can specify to update this file when an fbackup session completes successfully. Entries for each session are recorded on separate pairs of lines. The following four items appear on the first line of each pair: the graph file name,
backup level, starting time, and ending time (both in time(2) format). The second line of each pair contains the same two times, but in strftime(3C) format. These lines contain the local equivalent of STARTED:, the start time, the local equivalent of ENDED:, and the ending time. These second lines serve only to make the dates file more readable; fbackup does not use them. All fields are separated by white space. Graph file names are compared character-by-character when checking the previous-backup database file to ascertain when a previous session was run for that graph. Caution must be exercised to ensure that, for example, graph and ./graph are not used to specify
the same graph file because fbackup treats them as two different graph files.

[Helen French]

Hi Tony,

If fbackup is used for incremental backups, a database of past backups must be kept. fbackup maintains this data in the text file /var/adm/fbackupfiles/dates, by default.

This is the reason why your full backup doesn't write to this. For incremental backups, it needs to keep a track of saved data. See man fbackup for more details

HTH,
Shiju