Creating mountable snapshot view in macOS
1
I'm used to backup my user's home using rsync. However, I now have data (eg, running database) that shouldn't be backed up while being changed, and I'd like to keep the applications changing them running during the backup. I know file system snapshot views exist to deal with this problem: Linux has the LVM approach and Apple has Time Machine. However, apparently the former only allows one to mount a snapshot as a virtual file system, so that it's possible to use tools like rsync, tar, or, for what matters, cp, against a view of the files frozen at a given time. I cannot find any such feature for macOS, tmutil/Time Machine don't look to be the same thing, they must be leveraging the snapshot functionality of their APFS file system, but I can't find any way to see a snapshot as a set of fi