xfsdump questions

[Dave Chinner]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 09:57:38AM +0100, Stevie Trujillo wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> Is xfsdump an ancient relic or something recommended to new users (I
> have never seen anyone recommending it)? I gave it a try and found the
> incremental backups to be really fast!

Still supported, still works, still used in production by lots of
people.

> How are incremental backups implemented? I saw that my inventory file
> is really small. Does it use some internal xfs metadata to detect
> changes? Is it resilient against all kinda renames and changing
> timestamps etc that a user might do? (I've previously used a backup
> system that broke when doing stuff like that)

It should detect renames and changing timestamps, etc. without any
problems.

> Is it possible to backup (and restore) ctimes?

No.

> I read that the incremental backups are limited to a depth of 10. Are
> they intended to be used in a binary tree like fashion?

In theory. Not sure anyone actually uses incremental dumps like that
though, so you'd need to do a bunch of testing before deploying such
a solution.

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david at fromorbit.com