Jim Henderson wrote:
> I do recall that MS' DOS-based backup utility (I forget what it was 
> called) did actually observe the archive bit. 

All the backup utilities did (and do) pay attention to it. But the flag 
automatically gets turned on whenever you open a file for writing, so 
its use is primarily for differential backups. You do a full backup and 
while doing so turn off the bit, then later you can back up just the 
files with the bit set.

> skipping files you didn't want backed up (but a little creative thinking 
> would've come to the conclusion you could use it for both).

It would only skip files you didn't want *incrementally* backed up.  A 
full backup would still copy the file, and there's no semantics (in UNIX 
or Windows file systems at least) for "this is a temp file" sort of 
thing, so don't ever back it up, or at least throw it away if you need 
the room.

> True.  And I agree it would be nice if it recursed; considering the speed 
> of computers of the day, though, I wonder how practical it would've been 
> to implement - true you could do a dynamic evaluation, but MS so likes 
> doing the "traverse and stamp every object", as evidenced by the horribly 
> broken behaviour in AD version 1 when assigning rights through a 
> filesystem.   Thank goodness they fixed that behaviour.

That must have been a while ago. All the MS file systems I've ever 
looked at had heritable privileges. (Given they had privileges to start 
with, of course.) I'm not real sure where AD comes into it.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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