Backup of a live filesystem revisited

[Fred Fish]

In article <7446 at utzoo.UUCP> henry at utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>Another wart of dump programs that go through the filesystem is that the
>access time of files becomes largely useless, since the dump program ends
>up updating it on every backup.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why not just use utime(2) to reset the
st_atime and st_mtime fields, that's what bru does.  Of course, st_ctime
is not resetable, and any changes to st_atime or st_mtime by another
process while the file is being read out for backup are lost.  Backup
programs that diddle with the raw filesystem while it's active
give me the creeps...

-Fred


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