If you put the filesystem of interest on its own partition, then
ISTM you can mount -o remount,ro that one file system, and it should
remain static during the backup. All data will still be available,
though unmodifiable. Clearly, one would need to do something like
an lsof to ensure that nobody is using it when the remount takes
place.
Mike
Thanks Mike. Could be useful for my needs. Just curious. Would such a mount -o
remount,ro flush any dirty filesystem buffers like sync, or would it discard them.
Cheers,
-J