Deja Dup Creating New Backup and Igoring Recent Files

Applications
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I’ve reached the 3rd month of using Deja Dup and now I’m presented with an unusual problem. As Deja Dup works to create a new backup of my Plex server share, it ignores new files added to the share. Is this by design?

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No! Good question, but that’s not intended! If any new files show up in an included folder since the last backup, it should be backed up next time.

Do you mean like, new files that show up during a backup? Those might reasonably not be included.

How is the plex server share exposed to the computer? Like an nfs local mount?

What version of deja Dup?

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  1. This is happening at the 3 month interval when Deja Dup is creating a fresh backup. It not recognizing that there are new files added and backing those up first. It just keeps attempting to create the fresh backup.
  2. The Plex share is mounted to my Linux box and from there Deja Dup is backing it up to Gdrive.
  3. Version - 45.2-1build2
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OK, then maybe that is normal behavior - creating a full backup every now and then instead of an incremental one is intentional behavior.

There’s an entry in the FAQ about why. I’ll copy it here:

Déjà Dup will occasionally make fresh full backups for you. This takes up more space and more time, but offers the following benefits:

  • Full backups allow Déjà Dup to delete old backups. If it didn’t create a new full checkpoint, it could never delete old full checkpoints and their chains of incremental backups.

  • Sometimes there are bugs. Maybe somewhere in the Deja Dup app or Duplicity, or maybe you’ve got a flaky external disk. If all you had was a long chain of incremental backups and something goes wrong in the middle of the chain, you could invalidate months and months of backups down the chain. Now, bugs aren’t expected, but better safe than sorry. The occasional full backup prevents hideously long chains of incremental backups, which would increase the risk.

Déjà Dup assumes that disk space is cheap, that time-to-backup isn’t a terribly important detail, and that safety of data is paramount.

(Note that the experimental Restic backend does not need to make fresh full backups. The above is only true for the default Duplicity backend.)

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