Use existing filesystem, do not create a new one

[dark_shadow]

First, thanks for this great piece of software. It works very well.

I have the following suggestions / requests:

• Make it possible to skip the filesystem creation.
• Allow the user to specify options for filesystem creation (you can save a lot of space by restricting inode count etc.).

[admin]

I have no plan to let the user create the filesystem. but the second option may be quite useful. I will keep that in mind.

[Bigtwin]

Dear admin, in my search for a suitable ext4 partition backup tool, I found fsarchiver. After one short test, I found a behaviour, that makes the tool unusable for me, as it is now.

However, with a minor change, it would become the perfect tool for me. This change is as dark_shadow requested: skip the filesystem creation. Your reaction:I have no plan to let the user create the filesystem.

That is too bad, let me explain why that is important to me.

I want to backup all of my disks/partitions. If I mess up one file, I can only restore the entire partition. That makes me loose all of the changes to the partition, just because I want to restore one file.
I tried to deal with this shortcomming, and restored the whole partition to another disk.
But then this disk/partition is completely ereased, because the tool creates a new filesystem. This is absolutely an unwanted situation.


I hope you can make your tool a useable tool by adding three options:
-restore a single file from a backup
-add a warning when overwriting a file/partition, in case the restore command did not contain the correct parameters

And for me the most important one:

-restore to an alternate partition, without killing that partition with a new filesystem.
And that is the original question in this topic too.

If you manage to add these options, your tool might become a real good and usable tool.

[freddy77]

I think this tool was designed to save and restore entire partition not like a backup tool. Have you tried with savedir and restdir??

[Bigtwin]

No, I did not try those, as I need to backup on partition level. Most backup tools do file-directory level backup's.

I have a seven disk NAS, and can not backup / + subs, as it then back's up my entire NAS. I need to backup e.g. /dev/sda1 instead of root + subs.

I think indeed backup's are made to restore a partition if a disk fails.
But more often a restore is done if one file is damaged, wrongly edited, accidently deleted and so on. So restores on file level.

This should be possilbe, or am I wrong? Even if it is via a full restore of a partition to another disk. But then the create file system command should not be executed.

[freddy77]

Point taken.
So I think it would be fine to be able to:
- save a partition with savefs
- "restoring" with restdir but limiting files restored
Does this sounds ok to you ?

[Bigtwin]

Dear Freddy77, excuse me for my late answer.

Indeed it sounds great if I can backup partitions, and restore partition OR file level.

Partition level restore can remain as it was (works great) file restore option as second method, without creating any file system, preforably with the possibility to restore to an alternate location (e.g. /tmp or so).

Than you will have a TOP tool!

[freddy77]

I think you should thanks Francois instead :)

I'm just an happy user, it that I'm a developer too so I can understand his point of view.

freddy77

[Bigtwin]

Oh, I thought indeed I was talking to someone that was going to implement this functions.

Without these changes, I will search for another tool, that can do what I need.

[patrick013]

I don't think there is a "filesystem archiver" that does partitions or whole directories and
selects one file to restore. Perhaps a basic archiver that compresses a basic directory
backup into a compressed file, without concern for preserving the filesystem, will do that.

patrick013

[dark_shadow]

Does the savedir/restdir options save/restore all file attributes like savefs/restfs do
(e.g., how about access times)? Because then I will only have to backup the
directories and can restore them to a file system created by myself.

It's a pity that stdin/stdout is not supported instead of using files, this makes
cloning data from one fs to another more difficult. I've used cpio before which
provided functionality missing in fsarchiver but had other severe flaws (like being
unable to store files > 4 GiB in its image file).

[admin]

You can use savedir/restdir if you do not want the filesystem to be recreated. It will just be similar to a simple tar.gz.
It will also preserve all files/dirs attributes (permissions, xattr, ...) on unix filesystems.
It does not support stdin/stdout because you cannot seek on that. It's a design choice, not a missing feature.
Seeks are required to implement certain things and to be able to cope with corruptions.

[dark_shadow]

You can use savedir/restdir if you do not want the filesystem to be recreated. It will just be similar to a simple tar.gz.
It will also preserve all files/dirs attributes (permissions, xattr, ...) on unix filesystems.

That's great, thanks for your answer.

[dark_shadow]

Ah yes, one question I forgot to ask:

Will `fsarchiver savedir' reset access time on the file being read?
cpio can do this:
`-a'
`--reset-access-time'
Reset the access times of files after reading them, so that it
does not look like they have just been read.

[admin]

The access time is currently not restored, this is something that we have to do.