Re: Live Fille System Backup
On Fri, 05 May 2017, Sergei G wrote:
> it would be naive at best to think that busy files can be handled at
> application level. No, rsync cannot handle the problem of entire file
> system dump. Neither it is safe to handle all special file cases. I am
> thinking about sparse files (if Linux has those).
Yes, Linux has sparse files. And yes, rsync can deal with sparse files,
check its documentation. It can also deal with many "special files",
extended attributes and ACLs properly, if directed to do so.
Also, shortcut "file/inode changed" detection can break on Debian
*system* directories. *You have been warned*. Either always do a full
backup of those, or use something that actually _always_ checksums the
contents (such as rsync -c), when doing dedup or incremental backups.
As for live data such as running database backends, or active logs, you
have to snapshot/quiece such applications for a rsync backup just like
you'd have to do for filesystem or device snapshotting, or any other
non-application-level backup.
--
Henrique Holschuh
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