Volumes mounted through MetaSAN might back up incremental backups as full (4048025)

Date: Apr 08
Product & Version: All
OS Version: All
Module & Version: All
Application version: MetaSAN 2.2.4 and earlier

Symptoms:
When using the Tiger Technology MetaSAN software to mount a LUN on a system, NetVault might run incremental backups of the root selection on this volume as full - i.e. backing up all files.

Reason:
MetaSAN includes a software package that is installed on the Operating System (mostly Mac OS X) that maps the files to the underlying storage, enabling their use on other operating system that also have the software installed. The mapping is done so that each OS sees the volume as having its native file system (e.g. HFS+, NTFS etc.). Due to this layer of abstraction, this software can introduce changes on the files that would not be present on regular systems.

The fault is with the MetaSAN software which doesn't completely emulate a local filesystem. It has been addressed and fixed by Tiger Technology in OS X 2.2.5 Build:6b225, and is included in version 3 of their software.