From c3370a5f076683a944a2cb574f264af48592d659 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Thomas Waldmann Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 18:48:14 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] improve docs about what is preserved and what not UNIX domain sockets: explain why not, see attic issue #259 Symlinks: say that they are backed up as is and not followed, replacement for attic PR #294 Sparse files: explain what the "simple" in simple sparse file support means. Plus some other explanations / mentions that were missing. --- docs/faq.rst | 25 +++++++++++++++++++------ 1 file changed, 19 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) diff --git a/docs/faq.rst b/docs/faq.rst index d6ffe99ea..1721d9531 100644 --- a/docs/faq.rst +++ b/docs/faq.rst @@ -25,20 +25,33 @@ Can I backup from multiple servers into a single repository? Borg will keep an exclusive lock on the repository while creating or deleting archives, which may make *simultaneous* backups fail. -Which file attributes are preserved? - The following attributes are preserved: - +Which file types, attributes, etc. are preserved? + * Directories + * Regular files + * Hardlinks (considering all files in the same archive) + * Symlinks (stored as symlink, the symlink is not followed) + * Character and block device files + * FIFOs ("named pipes") * Name * Contents - * Hardlinks and symlinks * Time of last modification (nanosecond precision with Python >= 3.3) * User ID of owner * Group ID of owner - * Unix Permission - * Extended attributes (xattrs) + * Unix Mode/Permissions (u/g/o permissions, suid, sgid, sticky) + * Extended Attributes (xattrs) * Access Control Lists (ACL_) on Linux, OS X and FreeBSD * BSD flags on OS X and FreeBSD +Which file types, attributes, etc. are *not* preserved? + * UNIX domain sockets (because it does not make sense - they are meaningless + without the running process that created them and the process needs to + recreate them in any case). So, don't panic if your backup misses a UDS! + * The precise on-disk representation of the holes in a sparse file. + Archive creation has no special support for sparse files, holes are + backed up up as (deduplicated and compressed) runs of zero bytes. + Archive extraction has optional support to extract all-zero chunks as + holes in a sparse file. + How can I specify the encryption passphrase programmatically? The encryption passphrase can be specified programmatically using the `BORG_PASSPHRASE` environment variable. This is convenient when setting up