From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Aug 19 00:05:51 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8A10516A4DD for ; Sat, 19 Aug 2006 00:05:51 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from dking@ketralnis.com) Received: from ketralnis.com (melchoir.ketralnis.com [68.183.67.83]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 415C843D46 for ; Sat, 19 Aug 2006 00:05:51 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from dking@ketralnis.com) Received: from [10.226.140.218] ([166.137.78.7]) (authenticated bits=0) by ketralnis.com (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id k7J05j28034836 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=RC4-SHA bits=128 verify=NO) for ; Fri, 18 Aug 2006 17:05:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dking@ketralnis.com) Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v752.2) Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <5A2F107D-D8D1-4262-B2F3-20455B993624@ketralnis.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org From: David King Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 17:04:49 -0700 X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.2) Subject: preserving metadata on filesystems that don't X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2006 00:05:51 -0000 I would like to create monthly backups of large chunks of data that make full use of the unix file system features (that is, regular permissions, symlinks, hardlinks, support of certain special characters, etc). I would like to back this data up to a (remote) filesystem that doesn't support some of these features. My question is, how can I back up this metadata when the target filesystem doesn't support it? It seems like it wouldn't take much ruby/perl/younameit to create a small berkelydb or something of all of the "original data" (like permissions and where symlinks live) and a map from "original" filename to the target filename (in the case of unsupported characters). Since this is relatively simple, and I imagine that the incidence of people wanting to back up their data to things like USB keys that they can access from other operating systems (in this particular instance, I am using a Xythos server with a WebDAV remote filesystem), I imagine that this code has already been written, but maybe I'm just using the wrong search terms. I'd also like to not reinvent rsync if I can avoid it. Since the target is webdav, I guess that I could use webdav properties to store this information (any ideas on how to automate that?), but I have to imagine that this has already been done for target filesystems like FAT32