backups

Colin Walters walters at redhat.com
Sun Sep 19 23:20:16 UTC 2004


So, it seems to me that our backup software situation is really a
mess.  

One particular feature that I absolutely need is xattr support, because
all my machines run SELinux.  My personal server also uses ACLs for a
few files.

As far as I can tell, the *only* software we ship that even supports
xattrs at all is "star".  However star has the enormous drawback that it
doesn't support incremental dumps.  This makes it nearly useless for me
since my server has various ISO images and the like lying around, and
re-archiving them for each backup would quickly eat space.  Also, star
is written by someone who has displayed a fundamental misunderstanding
of the GPL.

Now, rsync has an experimental patch for xattr support:
http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2003-June/006413.html
But we don't apply it.  We'd also need an additional SELinux-specific
patch to make it use setfscreatecon to avoid a race condition. 

It doesn't look to me like librsync supports xattrs either, so none of
the programs based on it like rdiff-backup will.

However, even if we had an xattr+SELinux-capable rsync, I think we'd
still need a tar-like archiver (one better than star).  I did a bit of
searching on this and found "dar":
http://dar.linux.free.fr/

Has anyone used this program?  It looks to be quite nice; if we can just
add the specific SELinux support I think it would be a good replacement
for star.  I particularly like how its incremental backups support
deleting files too.  I'm a bit unsure of whether its xattr support
implies ACL support.

Are there any other programs I missed?  Particularly ones that people
out there actually use?

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