Out of curiosity a few months ago, I wrote a tool from scratch to get a backup of my home folder, and preserve as much as possible, including files/folders encrypted with fscrypt, inode creation and change times etc. It works but it's hackish, and the reason is that the currently available system call interface has a few limitations that prevent a cleaner/safer approach. In this presentation I'll try to point out those limitations, present some use cases specific to backup, and hopefully get some feedback on how to proceed.