Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2010 10:31:59 +1100 From: Andrew Reilly <areilly@bigpond.net.au> To: Thomas Ronner <thomas@ronner.org> Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ZFS backups: retrieving a few files? Message-ID: <20101123233159.GA11081@johnny.reilly.home> In-Reply-To: <4CEBB9E1.6040403@ronner.org> References: <20101122113541.GA74719@johnny.reilly.home> <4CEA8BA6.7080009@kc8onw.net> <20101123124543.GA4751@johnny.reilly.home> <4CEBB9E1.6040403@ronner.org>
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On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 01:56:01PM +0100, Thomas Ronner wrote: > On 11/23/10 1:45 PM, Andrew Reilly wrote: > >No, I don't like tar, rsync and friends for backups: they don't > >deal well with hard links, special files or sparse files. > > rsync -avHxS --delete --numeric-ids /src/. /dst/. > > Handles sparse files (S) and hard links (H). Never had any trouble with > special files. What sort of special files are not handled correctly by > rsync? I'd like to know because I'm relying on rsync for backups for > years on my home network. I remember having problems with hard links, but it's possible that I wasn't using rsync correctly. Of special files, I don't remember non-dump backups doing well with the unix-domain sockets that were liberally used and tricky to set up right for djb's daemon-tools. Most uses of sockets put them in /tmp, don't get backed up, and they don't need to persist. Dan puts them in /var, and they're expected to persist across reboots, which means they need to be backed-up. Maybe rsync and modern tar handle these OK, but I remember at least one of them getting wedged just trying to read one as a file. The special files in /dev used to be a problem too, but that's gone away, now that we have devfs. I really like dump/restore. I expect that I will miss them. Cheers, -- Andrew
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