From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Nov 21 4:56:32 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from athserv.otenet.gr (athserv.otenet.gr [195.170.0.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1D8F5151E5 for ; Sun, 21 Nov 1999 04:56:22 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from keramida@diogenis.ceid.upatras.gr) Received: from localhost.hell.gr (patr530-a045.otenet.gr [195.167.115.45]) by athserv.otenet.gr (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id OAA18171 for ; Sun, 21 Nov 1999 14:56:24 +0200 (EET) Received: (qmail 25692 invoked by uid 1001); 20 Nov 1999 16:30:28 -0000 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: backup w/o touching files' last-accessed times References: From: Giorgos Keramidas Date: 20 Nov 1999 18:30:28 +0200 In-Reply-To: John Quincy's message of "Fri, 19 Nov 1999 14:06:16 -0500 (EST)" Message-ID: <86zow9ruqj.fsf@localhost.hell.gr> Lines: 22 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.6.45/XEmacs 21.1 - "20 Minutes to Nikko" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG John Quincy writes: > I'm using "dump" to backup users' e-mail nightly. Unfortunately this > changes the last-accessed time of their INBOX so that their shell only > reports "You have mail" instead of "You have new mail" when they log in. > (Say they receive new mail at 2:55a and the backup is done at 3:00a. The > last-accessed time is greater than the last-modified time, so the shell > assumes the user has already read his latest mail.) > > Surely I'm not the only dope who's wondered about this. How do you do a > backup without munging the last-accessed time on files? You could mount the filesystems with noatime, which will also have the effect of making the filesystem a bit faster AFAIK (because when you just read a file which is cached, it's atime won't have to be updated, saving a few fs operations). Some BSD kernel guru, correct me if I'm wrong. -- Giorgos Keramidas, "What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing." [Aristotle] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message