A notion about saving and restoring Windows file security info

Wed Jan 5 10:34:16 GMT 2022

On Jan 4 22:45, Eliot Moss wrote:
> 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?

It would be possible with not too much effort. That would need a bit
of discussion, for instance, do we want to show up the native ACL in
listxattr?
Corinna