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To: Mikhail Teterin <mi+mill@aldan.algebra.com>
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 12:47:31 -0800
From: Kirk McKusick <mckusick@mckusick.com>
Cc: =?utf-8?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=C3=B8rgrav?= <des@des.no>, questions@freebsd.org,
	fs@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Automatic `nodump' flag? 
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> From: =?utf-8?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=C3=B8rgrav?= <des@des.no>
> To: Mikhail Teterin <mi+mill@aldan.algebra.com>
> Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:54:02 +0100
> Cc: questions@freebsd.org, fs@freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Automatic `nodump' flag?
> 
> Mikhail Teterin <mi+mill@aldan.algebra.com> writes:
> > I'd like the entire contents of each user's .mozilla/firefox/*/Cache
> > directory to be excluded from the regular filesystem dumps.
> >
> > Running ``chflags -R nodump /home/*/.mozilla/firefox/*/Cache'' does
> > the trick, but this needs to be redone daily -- prior to running the
> > backup -- because new entries appear in the caches, obviously... The
> > new entries don't have the nodump flag set.
> >
> > Is there a way, the flag can be set automatically? For example,
> > inherited from the directory? Thanks!
> 
> Hmm, shoudn't whichever backup tool you're using stop when it encounters
> a nodump directory?  You shouldn't need to set nodump on the files
> themselves.
> 
> DES
> -- 
> Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des@des.no

The dump program runs on the raw disk partition dumping sequentially
by inode number. So, it has no idea of the file-tree hierarchy. Thus
any propagation of the "nodump" flag would have to be done by the
filesystem (or by using a different archiving program). It seems to
me that possible changes that could be made would be to update the
semantics of the existing "nodump" flag to say that if it is set
on a directory, then any new files or directories created within 
that directory would also have the "nodump" flag set. Or a new
"nodumpall" flag could be added that when set on a directory would
propagate to any new files or directories created within that
directory. Both of these would be easy to implement.

	Kirk McKusick