Re: FS: hardlinks on directories

[Stephan von Krawczynski <skraw@ithnet.com>]

On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 16:09:28 -0500
Jesse Pollard <jesse@cats-chateau.net> wrote:

> > > It was also done in one of the "popular" code management systems under
> > > unix. (it allowed a "mount" of the system root to be under the CVS
> > > repository to detect unauthorized modifications...). Unfortunately,
> > > the system could not be backed up anymore. 1. A dump of the CVS
> > > filesystem turned into a dump of the entire system... 2. You could not
> > > restore the backups... The dumps failed (bru at the time) because the
> > > pathnames got too long, the restore failed since it ran out of disk space
> > > due to the multiple copies of the tree being created.
> >
> > And they never heard of "--exclude" in tar, did they?
> 
> Doesn't work. Remember - you have to --exclude EVERY possible loop. And 
> unless you know ahead of time, you can't exclude it. The only way we found
> to reliably do the backup was to dismount the CVS.

I don't know the system, so I can only judge from your description:
if they allow mount of something insive the cvs tree, then you have a
mountpoint and can --exclude=mountpoint. You don't run into the system root and
are fine, right? If you don't have known fixed mountpoints use mount -l to find
out.


Regards,
Stephan