backup when permission changes

[afrankel]

If a permission changes on an existing file, will the content of the file will be backed up again? Not sure if it matters, but the filesystem is GPFS.

Thanks,

Andras

[LED888]

From the TSM Client manual -
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infoce...2_7_3_0#unfull

Back up files whose contents changed since the last backup. The client considers a file changed if any of the following attributes changed since the last backup:
File size
Date or time of last modification
Access Control List
If only the following items change, they are updated without causing the entire file to be backed up to the server:
File owner
File permissions
Last access time
Inode
Group ID

Good Luck,
Sias

[chad_small]

Interesting question:

One Friday way back in early 2001-2002 we had a user CHMOD all the files and folders in the home directory. We were alerted to the problem Monday (after 3 nights of backups had run) and proceeded to restore the home directory. TSM does not just change the permissions, it has to restore the files...the problem was that none of the files were backed up again. Back in the day (and I think they changed TSM's behavior) when UNIX permissions changed TSM would only update the permission settings in the TSM DB for the file. So restoring the files did us no good since their were no previous versions on many of the files that had the old permission settings. I never did go back and check to see if they changed the behavior. I'm pretty sure they did, but back then it was not how TSM worked.

[afrankel]

Chad,

I would rather backup metadata separately and let TSM backup the data only.

What hurts us is that our users do a lot of setfacl recursive on their directories. Does anybody know if TSM behaves this way (backup up ACLs) if GPFS uses NFSv4 ACLs only?

Thanks,

Andras

[moon-buddy]

As I recall (current behaviour from version 4.2 and up (not 100% sure)), TSM updates its metadata and when a restore is needed, TSM applies this updated information to the restored data.