Preservation of attributes

FSArchiver has been written with the preservation of everything in mind. We want to be sure that a filesystem saved with fsarchiver will keep both the filesystem attributes (filesystem features, label, uuid) and all the file attributes (contents, timestamps, owner, permissions, extended attributes, acl, …). There is no need to specify any option in fsarchiver to preserve these sort of things. This is the default behaviour. The down side is you may have error about the mount options when the extended-attributes or the ACLs are not visible.

Mount options required

The standard attributes (permissions, owner, …) are always visible. Unfortunately, the extended-attributes and the ACL (which are stored as extended-attributes) may not be visible by the programs when the file-system is mounted with the wrong options. For example the ext3/ext4 filesystem may have to be mounted with options “user_xattr” and “acl”. It depends on the “default mount options”. If these required options are set as “default mount options” in the superblock of the filesystem, then it’s not necessary to specify these options then you mount it, or when it’s mounted via fstab. Here is an example of a partition which has “acl” as a default mount option, but “user_xattr” is not:

# dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda1 | grep -i "default mount options"
dumpe2fs 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
Default mount options:    acl

If these mount options are not used, the risk is that extended attributes or ACLs may have been written in the filesystem in the past, and these attributes are now invisible because of the mount options. Then fsarchiver will warn about it because it cannot save these attributes and they would be lost when you restore the filesystem. Fortunately, this is an extreme case. In general, if the mount option does not allow extended-attributes or ACL to be seen, it just means you don’t have that in the filesystem. The bad scenario may happen if you mount a filesystem from different operating systems, or with different mount options during the time.

Errors about the mount-option and solutions

When you try to save a filesystem with fsarchiver, it will check that all the required mount options that allow to see the extended-attributes and the ACLs are ok. If they are not, it will complain with the following error message:

# fsarchiver savefs /mnt/archives/gentoo-backup-20090328-01.fsa /dev/sda1 -A
create.c#0674,filesystem_mount_partition(): partition [/dev/sda1] has to be mounted with 
       options [user_xattr] in order to preserve all its attributes. you can use mount 
       with option remount to do that.
create.c#0681,filesystem_mount_partition(): fsarchiver cannot continue, you can use 
       option '-a' to ignore the mount options (xattr or acl may not be preserved)
removing /mnt/archives/gentoo-backup-20090328-01.fsa

The first solution is to remount the partition using mount with the remount option:

mount -o remount,acl,user_xattr /dev/xxx

You can also decide to ignore this error if you have no such attributes on your filesystem, or if you don’t want it to be preserved. In that case you can just run fsarchiver with the option -a and the operation will be able to continue.

# fsarchiver savefs /mnt/archives/gentoo-backup-20090328-01.fsa /dev/sda1 -A -a

SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux)

Several important Linux distribution support SELinux, which is a Security Enhancement option that can be either enabled or disabled on your system. If SELinux is enabled, it may have two impacts on fsarchiver:

it can impact the programs that are running (including fsarchiver)

If SELinux is enabled when you save filesystems to an archive, you must check that there is no restriction that may impact fsarchiver. So you can save a filesystem on a system having SELinux enabled as long as it does not block fsarchiver. But it’s recommended to restore filesystems using fsarchiver from an environment where SELinux is disabled or not supported. You can use http://www.sysresccd.org[SystemRescue] which does not have SELinux enabled. The problem with SELinux during a restoration is that it can create labels on each file that is being restored, even if the original filesystem had no such labels.

its attributes have to be preserved (else you could have problems to boot)

If the operating system that you want to backup has SELinux enabled, it’s important to make sure that fsarchiver will preserve the SElinux labels, else your operating system may not boot properly after a restoration. Fortunately, this is the default behaviour: fsarchiver preserves all the file attributes by default, including the extended attributes, and SELinux labels are implemented as normal extended attributes. So fsarchiver is able to preserve the SELinux labels on any system that supports the extended attributes, as long as it can read and write the extended attributes on the filesystems where it is working.