So, it seems to me that our backup software situation is really a mess. One particular feature that I absolutely need is xattr support, because all my machines run SELinux. My personal server also uses ACLs for a few files. As far as I can tell, the *only* software we ship that even supports xattrs at all is "star". However star has the enormous drawback that it doesn't support incremental dumps. This makes it nearly useless for me since my server has various ISO images and the like lying around, and re-archiving them for each backup would quickly eat space. Also, star is written by someone who has displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the GPL. Now, rsync has an experimental patch for xattr support: http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2003-June/006413.html But we don't apply it. We'd also need an additional SELinux-specific patch to make it use setfscreatecon to avoid a race condition. It doesn't look to me like librsync supports xattrs either, so none of the programs based on it like rdiff-backup will. However, even if we had an xattr+SELinux-capable rsync, I think we'd still need a tar-like archiver (one better than star). I did a bit of searching on this and found "dar": http://dar.linux.free.fr/ Has anyone used this program? It looks to be quite nice; if we can just add the specific SELinux support I think it would be a good replacement for star. I particularly like how its incremental backups support deleting files too. I'm a bit unsure of whether its xattr support implies ACL support. Are there any other programs I missed? Particularly ones that people out there actually use?
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