I am experimenting with Duplicacy to backup both MacOS APFS and ZFS. On APFS, I get
INFO LIST_ATTRIBUTES Discarding file attributes
this is concerning, as backing up file metadata is important for a system restore.
What is the meaning of this message and what is being lost?
BTW, so far I am highly impressed with Duplicacy
thank you
Tangential comment: You cannot use Duplicacy for system restore. It’s meant strictly to handle user data.
With system protections in place (such as SIP and secureboot) you will not be able to restore system volume and end up with bootable system.
MacOS has its own system restore facilities (accessible from the restore partition and through tools like migration assistant and time machine). Those tools are signed by Apple and explicitly trusted to mess with the system. Duplicacy isn’t. Allowing third party tools to restore the system is a massive security hole — and as such is not allowed. It’s of course a bit more complex than that — e.g. look what CCC has to do to support system restore in Catalina — but that’s entirely different class of tools.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that I wanted to completely restore the full system from Duplicacy; only restore user files and applications once a standard system is reinstalled. That is, get it back to the way it was.
All that is backup by duplicity is /System/Volumes/Data/.
thanks!
Discarding file attributes actually means file attributes are temporarily removed from memory to reduced memory usage. They will be reloaded (and therefore stored) when creating the final snapshot as the last step of the backup.
Thanks. This seems more like a debug than an info message, or at least needs least alarming wording 