On Mon, 10 Jun 2002 12:15:22 +0200 (CEST), Matteo Centonza wrote:
> i'm trying to figure out if there's an easy way to skip several
> subtrees with xsfdump without the need of specifying a bunch of
> subpaths on the command line.
This was deliberately not done for mainly two reasons:
1. Performance. The current system of excluding files was able to be
implemented in such a way that it had very little performance impact on
xfsdump. Handling directories however, would have had a significant
impact as it would have meant invoking the "directory pruning" stage.
2. Security. I felt that allowing a user to exclude an entire directory
tree, regardless of the contents of that tree, could very well lead to
problems. Directories owned by Frank could contain files and entire
directory trees owned by Joe. If Frank decides to exclude the tree, Joe
will not have any of his files backed up, and Joe wont necessarily know
about this until he tries a restore. It shouldn't be possible for a
user to decide whether another user's files get included in a backup.
This is a decision for the owner or for the administator.
IMO, the best way to do this would be as an option to xfsdump -- sort of
an inverse of the -s option.
At the moment, however, you will either have to set the attribute on all
the files in the tree you want to exclude, or use the -s option to
specify all the directory trees you want to include.
Ivan
--
Ivan Rayner
ivanr@xxxxxxx
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