"deep" gpart backup?

[Marcel Moolenaar]

On Jan 11, 2014, at 9:27 AM, Mark Felder <feld at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 4, 2014, at 15:53, Lev Serebryakov wrote:
>> Hello, Freebsd-geom.
>> 
>> Is here any way to make "deep" "gpart backup | gpart restore"? Now, when
>> I
>> have disk with MBR, with two slices, each of which has BSD label, I need
>> three calls of backup / restore commands with proper arguments. It looks
>> just stupid :)
>> 
> 
> If gpart can see and manipulate all of these elements it really should
> be able to backup and restore them all atomically.

This statement is close to being ridiculous. Being able to
operate on all components is absolutely not a sufficient
condition for doing atomic operations across a multitude
of them. Atomicity is a very particular requirement.

Note also that gpart (in its most vague definition) cannot
actually manipulate on *all* elements at the same time.
Nested partitioning schemes are not seen by the gpart
invocation that works on the outer-most container. Only
when running gpart on a partition will it (= gpart) be
able to work on the nested partitions. As such, no single
gpart invocation sees all levels of nesting.

gpart is an inherently low-level utility and what you want
is intended (i.e. by design) to be handled at an application
layer above gpart.

FYI,

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
marcel at xcllnt.net