Skipping files with dump(1)
Submitted by Bram Schoenmakers on 13 January, 2007 - 00:20.
In order to decrease our backup size we decided to skip some files and directories which were not critical. With chflags(1) you can skip entire directories:
chflags -R nodump mydir
But after the next backup iteration we observed the backup size didn't increase at all. A quick glance at the dump(1) manual revealed the following:
-h level --- Honor the user ``nodump'' flag (UF_NODUMP) only for dumps at or
above the given level. The default honor level is 1, so that incremental backups omit such files but full backups retain them.
above the given level. The default honor level is 1, so that incremental backups omit such files but full backups retain them.
I was not aware of such exception, thus adding -h 0 to the backup script did the trick.