[Bacula-users] Saving just the metadata and not the data

Hi all

There are some situations where knowing which files you had and how
they were organized is more important than the data on the files
themselves.

I'll give you an example: you collected a great amount of files
mirrored from different places on the internet, like say media files,
or linux packages repositories, or ISOs downloaded from different
places, and organized them carefully in a specific hierarchy to
satisfy a project you are developing which will use this data. Also
the permissions and ACLs on the dirs are of more importance than the
data. If you ever loose that data, you could re-download all of them
again, you would just want to have the file tree and all the metadata
saved to save you time when re-arranging it all (if space on the tapes
were a big deal or the collection is really huge, you don't need to
backup the data).

Is there a "good" way to do this with bacula? I can see some client
run script that would generate a list on the client filesystem
(dumping metadata -- acls, permissions, etc.) and backup it together
with other data, but that would be a re-implementation of what bacula
does best and I would like very much to have this handled by bacula
itself, to have the file list available in the bacula database as if
they were legitimate files, just happening to being empty of data on
the tapes. I could even want to restore them (giving me files of 0
bytes back on the disk).

The ideal world would be to have a different keyword for that in the FileSet:

FileSet {
  Name = Complete
  Include {
    Options {
      Signature = MD5
    }
    File = "/"
    File = "/boot"
    JustMetadata = "/data"
  }
}

I guess that's not possible, is there an equivalent way in funcionatily?

Thanks!

Andre

-- 
Andre Ruiz  <andre.ruiz AT gmail DOT com>
Curitiba, PR, Brasil

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