Backup failure

[silver.bullet at zoho.com]

On Sun, 27 Sep 2015 03:12:40 -0700, Brandon Vincent wrote:
>On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 2:37 AM,  <silver.bullet at zoho.com> wrote:
>> I need to mention that assumed tar would preserve attributes, there
>> would be the need to use sudo, since setting attribute bits requires
>> sudo too, so my first example was wrong, anyway, as shown by my
>> second example, attributes are not preserved even when using sudo.
>
>GNU tar will likely never support the preservation of
>GNU/Linux-centered filesystem attributes since it is designed to be
>cross-platform. The filesystem attributes for GNU/Linux filesystems
>are not found in the majority of other *nix operating systems, so
>introducing the option would serve little purpose. How do you handle
>restoring files to a filesystem that does not support such filesystem
>attributes? It would cause confusion with the end user.

Linuxisms are another topic. Important for this thread is, that backups
using tar archives can be saved to file systems that don't provide
Linux permissions, without losing the permissions for the files that
are inside the backup archive. The only pitfall are attribute bits, but
the averaged Linux home computer user unlikely needs to preserve
attribute bits, while at least a few might be comfortable with buying
FAT/NTFS formatted backup drives, because they need it to backup data
from their Windows-Linux-dual-boot machine and they don't know how to
format a drive.

What Linux is missing is a command comparable to FreeBSD's dump, that
allows to backup a complete install by itself.

Regards,
Ralf