preserving metadata on filesystems that don't

[David King]

I would like to create monthly backups of large chunks of data that  
make full use of the unix file system features (that is, regular  
permissions, symlinks, hardlinks, support of certain special  
characters, etc). I would like to back this data up to a (remote)  
filesystem that doesn't support some of these features.

My question is, how can I back up this metadata when the target  
filesystem doesn't support it? It seems like it wouldn't take much  
ruby/perl/younameit to create a small berkelydb or something of all  
of the "original data" (like permissions and where symlinks live) and  
a map from "original" filename to the target filename (in the case of  
unsupported characters).

Since this is relatively simple, and I imagine that the incidence of  
people wanting to back up their data to things like USB keys that  
they can access from other operating systems (in this particular  
instance, I am using a Xythos server <www.xythos.com> with a WebDAV  
remote filesystem), I imagine that this code has already been  
written, but maybe I'm just using the wrong search terms. I'd also  
like to not reinvent rsync if I can avoid it.

Since the target is webdav, I guess that I could use webdav  
properties to store this information (any ideas on how to automate  
that?), but I have to imagine that this has already been done for  
target filesystems like FAT32