Hi,

Moorcroft, Mark (ARC-TS)[ERC, Inc.] wrote on 2014-10-24 03:12:17 +0000 
[[BackupPC-users] lastlog]:
> Can someone please put the situation in Linux with not filtering
> /var/log/lastlog (sparse file) somewhere in the docs. It comes back to
> bite me every few years and I waste a bunch of time figuring out why rsync
> keeps aborting. Or for that matter just hard code ignoring that file.

oh, yes, great idea! Let me see ...

-rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 293168 Jan 31  2014 /var/log/lastlog

Yes, seems I should suffer from having an arbitrary file I might want in my
backups being silently ignored without an option to turn it off. That's
definitely a solution far superior to requiring people to configure their
backups correctly. All database files should also be ignored. They might also
be sparse, and people should probably back them up in a different way. Most
of the time. Well sometimes. As far as I want to think right now.

</sarcasm>

I believe lastlog is only a problem on 64-bit systems, and only until someone
comes up with a different implementation. Presumably, the name and path are
also configurable, not that many people are likely to change it. I'm not even
sure *how* you would propose ignoring it, since it's native rsync (or tar or
even samba) on the host. BackupPC would need to actively *add* an exclude
crafted to match /var/log/lastlog and any such file under any chroot
environment visible, regardless of how much of that path belongs to the
"share" and how much is beneath the transfer root. As impossible as it is
pointless.

Now, implementing handling of sparse files would be a different matter. Might
be difficult, and probably won't come for BackupPC 3.x (my guess), but it
would not arbitrarily break things for other users, and it would solve
problems with *all* sparse files.

Regards,
Holger

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