Comment 2 for bug 371719

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Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote : Re: establish ro,bind mount of /home for backup purposes

If a bind mount works for this, would it not also be possible to document how to extend backup utilities to do that mount just for the duration of the backup? I would prefer that to having the bind-mount around all the time. Backup utilities often already do tricks at least as complicated as this before they start a backup, for example creating LVM snapshots.

If you must have it available all the time, an fstab entry is questionable; I'd rather it were done dynamically in init scripts. I'm not wild about the name either; have a look through the FHS and see if you can think of a better location.

(How are backup utilities going to avoid backing up /home for certain users? They'd presumably want to back up only the encrypted files for users with encrypted home directories. This suggests that backup utilities would need to be modified anyway in order to play nicely with ecryptfs, in which case having to do a bind-mount doesn't seem a major imposition.)