On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 01:26:39PM -0700, Andreas Dilger via samba-technical wrote: > On Jan 9, 2020, at 12:10 PM, Steve French <smfrench@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > One loosely related question ... > > > > Your patch adds the ability to set creation time (birth time) which > > can be useful for backup/restore cases, but doesn't address the other > > hole in Linux (the inability to restore a files ctime). > > > > In Linux the ability to set timestamps seems quite limited (utimes > > only allows setting mtime and atime). > > The whole point of not being able to change ctime and btime as a regular > user is so that it is possible to determine when a file was actually > created on the filesystem and last modified. That is often useful for > debugging or forensics reasons. > > I think if this is something that SMB/CIFS wants to do, it should save > these attributes into an xattr of its own (e.g. user.dos or whatever), > rather than using the ctime and btime(crtime) fields in the filesystem. FYI, we (Samba) already do this for create time to store/fetch it on systems and filesystems that don't store a create time. It's easy to add extra info here.
