three hundred thousand directories 'created' during backup

Backups are taking about three hours for a particular fileserver and records indicate that over 300k new directories are being created every run.

I opened the XferLOG in a browser and searched for the word "create d" which catches every newly-created directory. The count was 348k matches. But the file count in the summary is only 4724 files [sorry for the formatting]:
Totals Existing Files New Files
Backup# Type #Files Size/MB MB/sec #Files Size/MB #Files Size/MB
31 incr 47568 10101.0 0.79 46950 8907.8 4724 1194.5

I'm not sure what the columns mean but the last line of this server's backups file is:
31 incr 1470272401 1470285236 47568 10591687070 46950 9340510442 4724 1252472758 0 0 0 0 3 6056094411 360393014

During this run the /var/lib/BackupPC//pc/$host/new/ folder grew at least 2.7G.

Is this expected behavior? Why does BackupPC think it needs to create new directories?

On 4/08/2016 23:56, cardiganimpatience wrote:
[quote]Backups are taking about three hours for a particular fileserver and records indicate that over 300k new directories are being created every run.

I opened the XferLOG in a browser and searched for the word "create d" which catches every newly-created directory. The count was 348k matches. But the file count in the summary is only 4724 files [sorry for the formatting]:
[/quote]I can't comment on the rest, but directory entries are always created,
because backuppc needs them for the backup structure (and there is no
disk saving/not possible to hard link them)...

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On 04 Aug 2016 14:04, Adam Goryachev wrote:
I can't comment on the rest, but directory entries are always created,
because backuppc needs them for the backup structure (and there is no
disk saving/not possible to hard link them)...

Makes perfect sense! Thanks for the response Adam.