Backup of a live filesystem revisited

[Henry Spencer]

> >Another wart of dump programs that go through the filesystem is that the
> >access time of files becomes largely useless, since the dump program ends
> >up updating it on every backup.
> 
> Maybe I'm missing something, but why not just use utime(2) to reset the
> st_atime and st_mtime fields, that's what bru does...

Then you lose st_ctime, which is infrequently used by humans, but is the
field that *backups* ought to be based on, since it captures things like
permission changes that don't alter st_mtime.  There are other things that
st_ctime is useful for also, albeit they are unusual.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry