-a implies -D, so a generation was written with --devices --specials and rsync recreated every unix socket and fifo it found in a volume. On the swarm manager that generation lives on an nfs-ganesha export, and ganesha accepts the socket on write but cannot serve it back: the remote pull's sender then fails with readdir/readlink_stat 'Invalid argument (22)' and exits 23, deterministically, for all twelve retries - 58 minutes per run.
Postfix's queue directory is the case that surfaced it, where public/ and private/ hold roughly fifty AF_UNIX sockets and nothing else. The class is wider: a discourse /shared with its in-container postgres socket, a checkmk OMD site with tmp/run/nagios.cmd, a container whose /tmp is a persisted volume. --no-D is type-based and closes all of them without anyone having to know which image binds a socket where.
Nothing restorable is lost. A socket inode is meaningless after a restore; postfix's master, checkmk's omd start and discourse's supervisor recreate theirs. The whole postfix queue survives - incoming, active, deferred, hold, maildrop - so accepted-but-undelivered mail stays in the backup, which excluding the volume outright would have dropped. Device nodes go too, and the only volume that could hold them is a nested docker data root, already carrying backup: false.
This is the writer side, whose source is a local docker volume. On the reader the same flag provably does nothing: rsync still stats the entry before -D decides, and getdents64 on the containing directory is outside its reach entirely.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Backing up a live volume with rsync copies a moving target: a database
written to mid-copy lands on disk in a state no engine ever committed.
Stopping the container avoids that at the cost of downtime.
A snapshot removes both. `--snapshot {btrfs,zfs}` with `--snapshot-subject`
freezes the docker root once per run, and every volume copy is then read
from that frozen tree while the containers keep serving. A restore of such
a copy is an ordinary crash recovery, which every supported engine performs
on its own at startup.
An unsupported filesystem or an unknown snapshot kind fails loudly rather
than degrading to a live copy, since a silent fallback would return exactly
the torn backup the mode exists to prevent. `--shutdown` is rejected
alongside `--snapshot` instead of being ignored: under a snapshot no
container is ever stopped, so accepting the flag would promise downtime
semantics the run does not deliver.
Copies out of a snapshot skip rsync's --checksum verification. The source
is immutable for the lifetime of the copy, so size-and-mtime cannot race,
and dropping the second full read roughly halves the I/O per volume.
backup/app.py grew past what one module could carry and is split into
layout, policy and dumps along the lines it already had internally.
Tests: unit coverage for the new snapshot, layout, policy, volume and cli
units; e2e cases drive real btrfs, zfs and ext4 filesystems on loop devices
in a privileged container, including a MariaDB that is written to across
the snapshot and must recover from the restored copy without losing a
committed row. CI installs zfs and sets E2E_REQUIRE_FILESYSTEMS so a
missing kernel module fails the build instead of silently skipping a
filesystem.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
