tar incremental backup with --listed-incremental does not work for me (Linux, Ubuntu)

Solution 1:

Looks like --atime-preserve break incremental backups. :( Try --atime-preserve=system - it's not documented on man page, but works.

Solution 2:

I do tar tar ((GNU tar) 1.23) based incremental backups as well (using cron): this is the (slightly modified) output of crontab -l from my setup:

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

0 0 * * 1-6 tar czfg /path/to/website/backups/website_inc_`date +\%Y\%m\%d`.tgz /path/to/website/backups/website.info -C /path/to/website/ public_html

0 0 * * 0 tar czfg /path/to/website/backups/website_inc_`date +\%Y\%m\%d`.tgz /path/to/website/backups/website.info --level=0 -C /path/to/website/ public_html

c = create; z = gzip compress; f=file; g=incremental; -C = directory to change to(