[PLUG] Backing up to DVD?

[Steve Bonds]

On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Chris Jantzen chris-plug-at-maybe.net |PDX Linux| wrote:

> > Many flavors of dump allow you to exclude files. None that I know of
> > have the ability to exclude ACLs or permissions from dumps. You don't
> > need to tell dump to backup ACLs, you get them and any other
> > filesystem-specific extras archived no matter what.
>
> How can you say this *and* say that restore isn't fs-specific (prior
> msg)? What if I archive an ext2 system with ACL and restore to XFS with
> totally different ACL structures? Or what if I restore sensitive data,
> unwittingly, to a filesystem that doesn't support ACL's at all and the
> file is readable by the wrong people?

This is why ACLs will continue to suck until we get a unified and
consistent standard.  ;-)  Since UNIX treats everything as a stream of
bytes and ACLs lie outside that stream, unless each and every program
supports the particular ACL implementation for the filesystem in use
something as simple as making a copy or compressing a file will destroy
the ACLs.

If using ACLs it's important to be fail-safe so that if the ACLs are
removed, less access is given rather than more.

The dump/restore in use on Linux doesn't support ACLs, though it *is* kind
enough to warn you if it detects that you have them on a particular inode.

  -- Steve