Hi John, Ivan,
thanks for the reply;
> 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.
>
BTW you can skip (or better trigger) the directory pruning or the
recursive exclusion via a flag to xfsdump.
> 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.
>
that's quite draconian. I don't know attribute's guts much in details, but
maybe you can prevent a user from setting a kind of attribute
(using a reserved namespace).
> 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.
Ciao,
-m
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