Solved: backuppc aborts backup because of tar messages on linux with non english locale

You can find lots of posts in the internet concerning a problem where backups abort because of the following message

/usr/local/bin/tar: ./home/remote/.profile: file is unchanged; not dumped

which is actually not an error. This problem has been fixed somewhere in 2006. But I was still experiencing the problem, with a little difference: the error message was in German. It turns out, that the fix from 2006 does only ignore english messages.

You can easily get rid of the problem by editing your Xfer config:

In TarCliendCmd and TarClientRestoreCmd replace

/usr/bin/sudo /var/backups/tarcreate.sh -c -v -f – -C $shareName –totals

with

/usr/bin/sudo LANG=C /var/backups/tarcreate.sh -c -v -f – -C $shareName –totals

this executes the command with english locale and your backup works again.