X-Recipient: archive-cygwin AT delorie DOT com X-Original-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com DMARC-Filter: OpenDMARC Filter v1.4.1 sourceware.org 292083858C2C Authentication-Results: sourceware.org; dmarc=none (p=none dis=none) header.from=cs.umass.edu Authentication-Results: sourceware.org; spf=pass smtp.mailfrom=cs.umass.edu To: cygwin From: Eliot Moss Subject: A notion about saving and restoring Windows file security info Message-ID: <4c5fda33-8f7e-53d2-85ce-28eb11cfb978@cs.umass.edu> Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2022 22:45:29 -0500 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.12.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Language: en-US X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00, KAM_DMARC_STATUS, SPF_HELO_NONE, SPF_PASS, TXREP autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on server2.sourceware.org X-BeenThere: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.29 List-Id: General Cygwin discussions and problem reports List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Reply-To: moss AT cs DOT umass DOT edu Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; Format="flowed" Sender: "Cygwin" 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