Dear Cygwiners - Maybe this idea has been discussed before, and I can't say I exactly have a specific application in mind, but I was wondering about how one might achieve reliable backup/restore of files on a Windows system via a backup program written to the POSIX interface and ported to Windows via Cygwin.
The idea is this: expose the Windows file attributes (such as system, archive, hidden, etc.) as well as security descriptors (such as managed by icacls), via specifically named extended attributes, those read/written by get/setfattr. The Cygwin library could be enhanced to "know" the special names of these attributes and use the appropriate, different, underlying calls to get/set them. Is this a crazy idea? A useful one? (How useful?) What implementation effort would be required? What brought it to mind is the restic backup/restore program, which AFAIK lacks support for these things, but does know how to save/restore xattrs. (So I could fake the same thing there, provided I duplicate in golang in restic what I am suggesting might be done for Cygwin in it library.) Regards - Eliot -- Problem reports: https://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: https://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: https://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: https://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
