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Comment by chenxiaolong | Hacker News Reader

Kopia is great, though it's worth noting for folks on Linux: non-UTF-8 paths aren't stored correctly [1] and xattrs aren't stored [2]. While most folks probably won't care about the former, the latter can could cause issues (eg. losing SELinux labels makes it difficult to restore a backup of the root filesystem on distros that use SELinux).

[1] https://github.com/kopia/kopia/issues/1764

[2] https://github.com/kopia/kopia/issues/544

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> losing SELinux labels makes it difficult to restore a backup of the root filesystem on distros that use SELinux

True, but one should get into the practice of creating persistent policies rather than ad-hoc `chcon`'s all the time, so that a `restorecon -FR /` always restores all SELinux labels to the intended state, then the biggest hassle is just booting into initramfs shell to mount rootfs and `touch /.autorelabel`

My backups includes photos and files form the late nineties when I used dos/windows. At some point, their encoding got messed up and many file names are now not UTF-8.

I can’t be bothered to fix the names (it’s not realistically a problem), but if backup software can’t handle them, then it can’t handle backup up my data.

I wish I could upvote this more than once. Those are omissions that could lead to important information being lost in a way that you probably wouldn't notice when checking your backups.

MacOS X makes heavy use of xattrs, too.

> Yes, there's a whole bunch of things currently not captured at the filesystem level, including setuid/gid, hardlinks, mount points, sockets, xattr, ACLs, etc.

That was three years ago and it sounds like things are only slightly better.

These people are incompetent at making backup software.

I'm unsure if saying they're incompetent is the right thing. They just have a different priorities than you do.

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