strange behavior after moving target directory

[Matt McCutchen]

On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 15:00 -0400, John Joseph Bachir wrote:
> i recently got a bigger external drive (B) and move my backup file
> tree from drive A to drive B. [...]
> My daily sync usually takes 3 minutes. After moving the backup tree,
> the first sync took 20 minutes.

How exactly did you "move" the backup tree from A to B?  Did the move
operation preserve all the attributes that your backup operation
normally preserves?  If not, the first backup would have fixed all the
attributes and, if mtimes were not preserved, retransferred the files.

If your computer was always on and your external drive A was always
mounted, there's another possible explanation.  The inodes and
directories on drive A were probably cached in RAM, allowing the backup
script to conclude very quickly that no files needed to be transferred.
However, the first time you backed up to drive B, inodes and directories
had to be read from the drive, and from then on they were in cache.  The
trouble with this explanation is that one would think drive B's inodes
and directories would be cached as the backup tree was moved to drive B.

-- 
Matt McCutchen
hashproduct at verizon.net
http://hashproduct.metaesthetics.net/