From ffbc68aa2e2c63d59f8df06a548a0792cf17bdb1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Alexander Neumann Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2017 21:36:20 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] Document access time handling --- doc/040_backup.rst | 10 ++++++++-- 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/doc/040_backup.rst b/doc/040_backup.rst index 549b8eef7..38e047984 100644 --- a/doc/040_backup.rst +++ b/doc/040_backup.rst @@ -127,8 +127,8 @@ args: $ restic -r /tmp/backup backup --files-from /tmp/files_to_backup /tmp/some_additional_file -Backing up special items -************************ +Backing up special items and metadata +************************************* **Symlinks** are archived as symlinks, ``restic`` does not follow them. When you restore, you get the same symlink again, with the same link target @@ -140,6 +140,12 @@ If there is a **bind-mount** below a directory that is to be saved, restic desce archived as a block device file and restored as such. This also means that the content of the corresponding disk is not read, at least not from the device file. +By default, restic does not save the access time (atime) for any files or other +items, since it is not possible to reliably disable updating the access time by +restic itself. This means that for each new backup a lot of metadata is +written, and the next backup needs to write new metadata again. If you really +want to save the access time for files and directories, you can pass the +``--with-atime`` option to the ``backup`` command. Reading data from stdin ***********************