Backup non-regular file

Hi

I am using duplicacy to backup the entire system ‘/’, however duplicacy seems to be unable to backup non-regular file, like character device, socket, etc, which are essential for full system backup.

Is it possible for duplicacy to support these files along with set*id bit, file capability and xattr?

It would also be great if duplicacy can preserve soft/hard link.

Duplicacy is not a full system backup software.

What do you expect should happen / how you going to backup and restore a socket and other non-data files?

I would not backup the root. Backup user data only. There is no reason to duplicate system and transient data to the destination.

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Maybe duplicacy could behave like tar, which backup non-regular file by recording their filename and ftype.

Upon restore, recreate the file by using mknod/mkpipe.

But if that is too much to ask, then I would have to go back to using tar to create an image.tar first, then backup via duplicacy.

Never back up the entire system, when sth bad happens, you could never restore your entire system from the snapshot.

I recommend just back up your data files. System files contain process/ temp log/ temp update files etc. These files are useless compare to your data.

What’s more, duplicacy could not just resore part of your repo, it may take more time to restore if you back up the entire system.

2 Likes

Thanks for the advice.

Guess I would try to only backup /etc, /home and all my data on another drive instead.

It will be much smaller, much faster to backup and much faster to recover.

Just a note: you can restore parts of the repositories using filters.

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