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Comment by giantrobot

3 years ago

IIRC tar has some Unixisms that don't necessarily work for Windows/NTFS. Not saying reinventing tar is appropriate but there's Windows/NTFS that a Windows based tape backup need to support.

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giantrobot

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cosmotic  3 years ago

Most of what makes NTFS different than FAT probably doesn't need to be backed up. Complex ACLs, alternative data streams, shadow copies, etc, are largely irrelevant when it comes to making a backup. Just a simple warning "The data being backed up includes alternative data streams. These aren't supported and won't be included in the backup" would suffice.

  • jandrese  3 years ago

    All of that stuff matters when you're using the backup for its intended purpose: to restore a system after hardware failure.

    Unix tar is obviously not the right solution, but a Windows tar seems like it shouldn't be that hard to do and yet we are in the situation we are today. I've been using dump/restore for decades now on Unix, including to actually recover from loss, but I admit that it's not that pleasant to use. I like that it is very simple and reliable however, unlike the mess that is Time Machine (recovering from a hardware loss on a Mac is a roll of the dice, and I've gotten snakes) or worse Deja Dup. I'm not sure I've ever successfully recovered a system from a Deja Dup backup.

    • a1369209993  3 years ago

      > using the backup for its intended purpose: to restore a system after hardware failure.

      No. The intended purpose of a backup is to restore the data (such as the Frogger 2 source code) after a hardware failure. If it has the side effect of also producing a working system, that's good, but it's not the point. After all, the hardware necessary to build a working system may not exist any more; one (only-probably not the last) instance of said hardware just broke, after all.

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  • nycdotnet  3 years ago

    If you’re backing up a db or something sure, but for a file server this can be just as important as the data itself (ex: now everyone can read HR’s personnel files which had strict permissions before)

db48x  3 years ago

That’s fair; I wasn’t really considering windows. It seems like there ought to be some equivalent by now though.